Coordinated Mobile Robotics

Catalog description

Mobile robotics has made a large impact in our lives, from how we satisfy our consumerism to how we fight wars. Thousands of warehouse robots autonomously zip around each other in a highly structured and specialized environment that makes coordination look easy, while military robots are often teleoperated by more than one person, making coordination difficult. Moving beyond highly controlled scenarios presents many challenges. Most importantly, mobile robots will interact in complex environments with other robots and people. How can we ensure robots safely do what we want them to do? What are the ethical ramifications of multirobot systems? In this course, we study the past, present, and future of coordinated mobile robotics, including a discussion of ethics. The majority of this course is a seminar-style survey of issues and approaches for control and coordination in multi-robot systems.