Intelligent Beacons and Their Application to Distributed Multi-Robot Construction Tasks

报告人：潘亚君教授

时间：5月25日14:00

地点：信息与工程学院学术报告厅

Abstract

A mechanism used by social insects for the purpose of construction is construction templates. Similar to blueprints, a construction template is used by insects to guide where building material is deposited. The mechanisms these simple agents use can be manipulated, and adapted for use by likewise simple robotic swarms in hopes that these robotic agents will automate human scale constructions. This work describes a method by which the template based method of construction is extended, enabling structures of any shape consisting solely of straight lines to be built. This extension occurs by placing a certain amount of intelligence within the template, and is accomplished through the use of intelligent beacons, which are positioned by the robots according to a high-level plan specialized by a human user. The intelligent beacons, once placed by the robots, use a trip-line approach to trigger material deposition. This system not only enables a swarm to construct more generalized shapes, but also retains the benefits of using swarm systems such as their robustness, high amount of parallelism, and simplicity. Simulations are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system with respect to planar shapes. Furthermore, a hardware prototype capable of simple ring shaped constructions is developed and used to validate the simulation results.

Biography

Dr. Ya-Jun Pan is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Dalhousie University, Canada. She received the B.E. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Yanshan University in 1996, the M.E. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Zhejiang University in 1999 and the Ph.D degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National University of Singapore in 2003. She held post-doctoral positions of CNRS in the Laboratoire d’Automatique de Grenoble (Current Name: GPISA-Lab), France and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Alberta, Canada, in 2003 and 2004 respectively.  

Her research interests are focused on the robust nonlinear control, networked control systems, intelligent transportation systems and collaborative multiple autonomous ground/underwater vehicles. She is currently an Associate Editor of the Journal of Franklin Institute, and the International Journal of Information and Systems Sciences. Recently she is the Editor of the special issue on Advances in Methods for Control over Networks for the Journal of Control Science and Engineering. She is a senior member of IEEE, a member of ASME and a Registered Professional Engineer in the Province of Nova Scotia, Canada. She was awarded the 2008 Research Excellence Award in the Faculty of Engineering, Dalhousie University.