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Characterized as intelligent systems that integrate perception, reasoning, and action to perform cooperative tasks under circumstances that are insufficiently known in advance, and dynamically changing during task execution.

DOE article describing our research || Videos

People || Projects || Publications || Sponsors

Why build cooperating robots?

• Increased scope for missions inherently distributed in:
  • Space
  • Time
  • Functionality
• Increased reliability, robustness (through redundancy)
• Decreased task completion time (through parallelism)
• Decreased cost (through simpler individual robot design)

Application domain

• mining
• construction
• planetary exploration
• automated manufacturing
• search and rescue missions
• cleanup of hazardous waste
• industrial/household maintenance
• nuclear power plant decommissioning
• security, surveillance, and reconnaissance

Cooperative robotics testbeds

CESAR "Emperor" Robots

To test our cooperative methodologies in outdoor applications, we have one RWI Transit vehicle and four RWI ATRV-mini robots. These robots are equipped with SICK laser scanners, pan/tilt/zoom video, sonar, DGPS, and radio ethernet. The names (and nicknames) of the robots are:
Hadrian ("Haddie")
Augustus ("Auggie")
Vespasian ("Vespie")
Constantine ("Connie")
Theodosius ("Ted").
(All are named after Roman emperors.)

CESAR Nomads

To test our cooperative methodologies in indoor applications, we have four Nomadic Technologies robots equipped with a variety of sensors, including odometric, tactile, sonar, infrared, 2D laser, vision, and compass sensors, as well as an indoor laser-based 2D global positioning system. The robots are equipped with a radio ethernet system that allows inter-robot communication, as well as communication to host development workstations.

From left to right are:

Ada, Alexandra, Edith, Grace

(Named after women pioneers in computer science)