Center for the Foundations of Robotics Seminar, April 26, 2006: Methodology for Design and Analysis of Physically Cooperating Mobile Robots

Speaker:
Ashish D Deshpande

Time and Place:
Newell Simon Hall 1507­
Refreshments 4:45 pm
Talk 5:00 pm

Abstract:
A team of small, low-cost robots instead of a single large, complex robot is useful in operations such as search and rescue, urban exploration etc. However, the performance of such a team is limited due to the restricted mobility of the team members. The first part of my talk will present the results obtained toward the goal of enhancing mobility of a team of mobile robots by physical cooperation among the robots. We have carried out static as well as dynamic analysis of cooperating mobile robot system and developed 2-robot hardware to demonstrate cooperative behaviors.

There is a need to develop a methodology to design and analyze cooperative maneuvers involving multiple mobile robots. The second part of my talk will present our efforts toward the development of such a methodology. Our approach is to treat the linked mobile robots as a multiple degree-of-freedom object, comprising an articulated open kinematic chain, which is being manipulated by pseudo robots (p-robots) at the ground interaction points. Such rearrangement of the problem facilitates the adaptation of ideas from the cooperative manipulation literature. We present the new methodology by carrying out static as well as dynamic analysis for a 2-robot cooperation case with the new methodology. Also, we have demonstrated that introduction of redundant actuation, by an additional (third) robot, can help in improving the friction requirements. We also present our ideas for employing this newly designed methodology to analyze other interesting multi-body robotic systems.

Bio
Ashish Deshpande is a doctoral candidate under Dr. Jonathan Luntz in the Mechanical Engineering Dept. at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His areas of interest include mobile robotics, multi-body dynamics, controls and engineering design. Ashish has recived B.E. from VNIT, Nagpur, India in 1999 and M.S. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2002.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cfr/talks/2006-Apr-26.html