My Ph.D. thesis develops an energy shaping design framework that tackles two problems facing multi-robot teleoperation: connectivity-preserving coordination at the bottom level and authority dispatch at the top level. In a distributed way, the former seeks to retain a minimal communication network for tele-driving a multi-robot group, while the latter allocates a unique amount of authority to every user as per their task demands.
(a) Search and rescue in earthquake ruins.
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(b) Marine exploration, sampling and monitoring.
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Each problem imposes an exclusive challenge on rendering passive the teleoperation system. Connectivity-preserving coordination necessitates limiting the energy storage of a multi-robot team to a certain threshold with no knowledge of the user/environment energy injection beforehand. And besides, authority dispatch augments the robot network by interconnecting to it an auxiliary system, thereby inserting an extra source of energy. My work proposes to convert the multi-robot system into a novel power-preserving interconnection of several subsystems, and then to investigate and regulate their energy balance individually.
To know more details about my PhD thesis, you can either find a full version of it on my google scholar or refer to the three subpages of this category to gain a quick understanding of the main results of my thesis.