- About the Laboratory
The laboratory conducts an aggressive, integrative research and education program in intelligent robotic systems. Initiated in 1998, the centerpiece of this program is a set of yearly undergraduate design projects in which teams of senior students completely design, fabricate, test, operate, and manage high-quality robotic systems for performing a variety of scientific investigations. Past and ongoing projects include spacecraft, underwater vehicles, terrestrial rovers, airships, telescopes, and industrial robots.
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Once operational, these robotic systems are used by undergraduates, graduate students, and professional researchers to perform compelling science missions and to demonstrate advanced technology. Specific missions have included studies relating to marine archeology, coastal ecological studies, space-based photography, space environment characterization, satellite formation flying and constellation control, and autonomous operations. Collaborators for these missions have included, currently include, and/or will soon include agencies such as the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
The development and
use of these robotic systems serves as the keystone for the integrative nature
of the SCU program.
Overall, the mixing of engineers and scientists across a variety of
educational levels and from a multitude of organizations creates a particularly
stimulating environment for technical education, engineering innovation, and
scientific discovery.
Current Research Work
While a wide variety of robotics-oriented R&D work will always be explored, there are several focus areas for 2009-2010.
One specific research area is in the control of multi-robot systems. The lab continues to explore and extend its novel cluster space motion control approach. More than a dozen graduate theses have been published in this area already, with significant work on the control of 2-, 3-, and 4-robot land rover systems. New work is now focused on extensions to control of robots in three dimensions, on robust single-operator-to-multi-robot spoken dialogue interfaces, and on applications such as the control of sparse antenna arrays and adaptive oceanographic sampling.
A second research area is in the field of model-based anomaly management. This work seeks to develop and extend formal reasoning techniques for detecting, diagnosing, and resolving anomalies that occur in complex engineering systems. Our techniques are based on determining anomaly symptoms, diagnosis conjectures, and resolution directives through the use of first principles computational algorithms that operate on fundamental design data. We are applying this work to the state estimation and configuration control of spacecraft, automobiles, multi-rover clusters, and underwater vehicles.