Saturday, October 29, 2011
Hall 1-2 (San Jose Convention Center)
The development of cooperative multivehicle systems has received much attention over recent years, motivated by the fact that multiple robots working together as a team can distribute their resources to perform surveillance and rescue operations more efficiently and robustly than a single robot. Precise navigation of a group of underwater vehicles is a challenging task. In order to make cooperative robotic research and exploration more accessible to the scientific community, we are proposing a new kind of underwater robotic system: Autonomous Cooperative Underwater Robotic Vehicle (A-CURV), which is a modular underwater system of robots that is capable of self-navigation with a first level user interface. This system incorporates a centralized and decentralized control system. In this design, a center platform is used as the system's precision navigation node and several vehicles equipped with lower precision navigation sensors are tethered to the platform. Studies have shown that a centralized system will increase the system's precision when tackling complex tasks and a decentralized control system will improve the system's robustness. Using theories in cooperative modular robotics, an optimization process was formalized to analyze current technology investment strategies that would allow a robust and implementable underwater robotic design.This work discusses possible applications and methods to coordinate the control of the modules after assembly to ensure stable system performance. With the intension to contribute to the field of modular robotics; one experimental underwater robotic module, its sensor network, and a graphical user interface have been developed for testing methodologies in cooperative control.