Information Based Search in Turbulent Flows

3D Simulation of Oil Concentration from a Leak

Variations in material concentration resulting from a biochemical or radiological contaminant leakage, such as an oil spill in the ocean or a radioactive dispersal in the atmosphere, is dominated by turbulent mixing.  The result is a highly anisotropic and unsteady sensory landscape where sensor measurements become the sporadic and intermittent which renders gradient based search … Read more

Distributed Sensing and Tracking of Geophysical Flows

Geophysical fluid dynamics (GFD) is the study of natural large-scale fluid flows, such as oceans, the atmosphere, and rivers. GFD flows are naturally stochastic and aperiodic, yet exhibit coherent structure. Coherent structures are important because they enable the estimation of the underlying geophysical fluid dynamics.   While these transport controlling structures in GFD flows are inherently … Read more

Task Partitioning for Distributed Assembly

Distributed autonomous assembly of general two (2D) and three dimensional (3D) structures is a complex task requiring robots to have the ability to: 1) sense and manipulate assembly components; 2) interact with the desired structure at all stages of the assembly process; 3) satisfy a variety of precedence constraints to ensure assembly correctness; and 4) … Read more

Multi-Robot Systems for Large Scale Cooperative Tasks

Municipal Park in Belo Horizonte, Brazil by James Milligan

This project provided undergraduate and graduate students a unique opportunity to work with an interdisciplinary and international team of researchers on the design and control of multi-agent robotic systems. The technical focus of the collaboration was centered around the design of robust multi-robot coordination strategies for execution of large scale cooperative tasks. Advances in embedded … Read more