Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

This proposal requests equipment to facilitate research in the areas of mobile manipulators and mobile robots. These are extremely active research areas because they have great potential in applications such as reconfigurable work cells, autonomous inventory management, part delivery for manufacturing, mobile sensors for atmospheric research, mobile manipulators for rehabilitation science, reliable and self-healing robotic teams, and robotic monitoring in dynamic and uncertain environments. The requested equipment is multipurpose and will support a broad range of research programs that have direct applications in all these key areas. The equipment is needed to validate algorithms and design methods in the areas of multi-agent path following, learning control for motion primitives, model-based fault-diagnosis and fault-tolerant control, and robust optimization of robot motion. These research problems are naturally formulated and understood using mobile manipulators and robots. This suggests that the requested equipment is necessary to effectively demonstrate proposed solutions. Masters and PhD students will gain significant experience developing vision algorithms for the on-board cameras, implementing linear and nonlinear control algorithms, writing embedded software, integrating sensing and communication data in a control loop, filtering and fusing noisy sensor data, fault-diagnosis and handling, and user testing with human-robot interaction. This experience is an asset in future employment because many industries, including aerospace, movie and TV production, manufacturing, and medical and rehabilitation research, utilize robotic systems and require trained personnel to operate and design for this type of equipment.