GritsLab

Current Projects

Learning to Locomote

As robots evolve they are becoming increasingly “smarter”, but still can not and do not learn the way humans learn. For example, humans have evolved to move by walking or running; however, humans can learn how to move by other means (e.g. swimming, skateboarding, riding bikes, etc.). I don’t know of any current robot that [...]
Spatio-Temporal Routing

The idea behind this project is to route multiple robots to service spatially distributed requests at specified time instants, while optimizing some criterion, e.g. the total distance travelled. The routing problem is similar to the well known m-TSP or the vehicle routing problem, except that it is temporally constrained in that every request must be met at a [...]
Self-reconfiguring Robots

The goal of this project is to develop distributed control strategies to automatically reconfigure an ensemble of individual robotic modules from an initial configuration into a desired target configuration. A configuration in our work is a three-dimensional geometric arrangement of cubic modules where a cubic module is the basic building block of our system. Modular [...]
Autonomous Marionettes

The project is divided into three main research tasks: Puppet Choreography with Motion Programs, Imitating Human Motions, and Distributed Protocols for Coordinating Puppets.
Assignment and Formation Control

The primary goal for this research is to develop a method of dynamic role assignment and formation control for multi-robot systems for rotationally and translationally invariant formations. Most previous work has treated assignment and formation synthesis as two separate problems.
Adaptive Time Horizon for MPC

The typical approach in the receding horizon framework is to choose a fixed time horizon over which to predict the unknown variables and obtain the optimal control input. If we had perfect estimates we could then make the time horizon as large as possible subject to factors such as computation speed, convergence, stability, and satisfaction [...]
Dancing Robots

Stylistic Task Specification Framework applied to Aldebaran NAO robotic platform Typically, robotic algorithms focus on tasks which have concrete, functional objectives. Our framework aims to allow for more general specification based on stylistic considerations. Namely, we may think of the movement styles exhibited by classical ballerinas, disco dancers, and cheerleaders as differentiated by distinct stylistic tasks. [...]
Mobile Communication Networks

Mobile Communication Networks Exploration of complex and dangerous territories posts great challenges for robotics research. Intuition suggests that using cooperative multiple vehicles will increase time efficiency. Coordination of multiple vehicles typically relies on communication between vehicles, but direct communication is easily blocked or at least attenuated by obstacles. Hence one major challenge for a successful [...]
Bio-Inspired Systems

Biologically Inspired Heterogeneous Networks Social behavior of animals can offer solution models for missions involving a large number of heterogeneous vehicles, such as light combat ships, unmanned aerial vehicles, and unmanned underwater vehicles. We draw inspiration from the bottlenose dolphins, Tursiops truncatus, and develop coordination algorithms for heterogeneous multi-agent systems that are expressive enough to [...]
Hybrid Systems

Optimal Control of Hybrid Systems Hybrid systems can accurately model a large number of systems in many application domains where traditional non-linear systems can not. Since they are generally not as well understood, the options to control hybrid systems are usually more limited. Recently, there has been an enormous interest to use optimal control for [...]
Heterogeneous Networked Robotics

Resource Allocation in Multi Agent Networks In multi agent systems, the interaction among nodes, provide solutions to complex group level tasks. The scope of service, such systems provide, depends on the distribution of nodes, that are equipped with various resources and facilities. How can we exploit the distribution of facilities among the agents, to increase [...]
Networked Robotics

Automatic Deployment of Mobile Robots This is part of a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) project. The premise is to use a mobile sensor network of mobile robots to study the effects of climate change on Antarctica. Our aim is to provide high-level control for the mobile sensor network. To this end, we are [...]
Group-based Leader Follower Control

The basis of this work is creating application specific leader follower network topologies that are completely controllable. In particular, single leader networks are considered where the input signal is injected at the leader node and the follower nodes execute a nearest neighbor averaging rule. Under this set up, each network topology can be partitioned into [...]
Merging and Spacing

Distributed Air Traffic Scheduling During Terminal Approach Conventional air traffic management (ATM) practices are known to be too rigid to accomodate for the projected increase in air traffic over the next few decades. To address this issue, the FAA’s NextGen iniative aims to introduce a set of technologies that will modernize the national [...]
Convoy Protection

Scalable UAV Ground Convoy Protection When in a hostile environment, obtaining reliable information about upcoming threats ahead of time could mean the difference between life and death. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which can travel at high velocities and have a large field of vision, are excellent tools for performing such reconaissance missions. Here [...]