PhD Research: UB
Swarm System - Design, Built and Implementation of Heterogeneous Robots Swarm.
Adviser: Prof. Tarek Sobh
Swarm robotics is one the most
fascinating and new research areas of recent decades, and one of the grand
challenges of robotics is the design of swarm robots that are self-sufficient.
This can be crucial for robots exposed to environments that are unstructured
or not easily accessible for a human operator, such as a collapsed building,
the deep sea, or the surface of another planet. Developing a
multi-agent robot system with novel approaches with heterogeneity and larger
behavioral repertoire is a great challenge. In this
work, comprehensive study of hardware architecture of homogeneous robot
swarm and several problems related to the important aspects of robots hardware,
such as: sensor fusion, communication among the modules, hardware components
has investigated. Since this early research in swarm robotics, the
field has grown rapidly, dramatically with a much wider topics being analyzed
and addressed. Prior to this, most of the research had concentrated on
software designing, algorithms implementation which did not involve the
hardware components of the robot swarm system. A general question in designing
the hardware architecture of robot swarms is whether a specialized
hardware needed for each task or whether more general hardware architecture can
be developed which can be used for wide range of application. Is homogeneous
hardware architecture of robot swarms effective enough for localization,
mapping, exploring, and rescue? Most of the works so far demonstrated in swarm
robots have been achieved using the homogeneous robots. These homogeneous robot
modules are identical in size, shape and implemented using the same kind of
hardware components. Can we use homogeneous robot swarms in real time
constraints to work under the unknown environment by increasing the
complexity of task? There are other issues related to the hardware design
of the swarm robots such as size, cost, weight, flexibility and task
efficiency. To solve these open issues in the swarm robots is great
challenge for the researchers and its keeping them busy to overcome new
heterogeneous hardware structure.
To address this
problem, I have proposed novel hardware architecture of heterogeneous robots
swarm. I have design and built team of heterogeneous robots that can
be used for real life applications as well as for research
purpose. The proposed work shows the implementation of heterogeneous swarm
robot, as they consist of different sensory units, different communication
units on each modules, which is distinct from other platforms. The UB
swarm of heterogeneous robots devises a hybrid distributed system that
overcomes the drawbacks of both centralized and decentralized schemes. The
proposed heterogeneous swarm robot can carry out a large number of tasks
simultaneously with simpler and cheaper robots than if more sophisticated
robots were used to conduct each separate task.
The proposed hardware architectural
design provides a non-expert user with an accessible yet very robust robotic
platform on which to further add and develop complex robotic functions,
actuators, sensing devices and task descriptions without having to design
or delve deeply and create complicated software, firmware. This swarm
robot system architecture can offer additional capabilities
and functionality such as self-organizing,
self-reconfigurability; which are useful for the accomplishment of concrete
tasks.
