Abstract

In this talk, I will describe our progress in developing distributed control policies to achieve rendezvous by a set of robots, even when some robots in the system do not follow the prescribed policy. These nonconforming robots correspond to faults in the multi-robot system, and our control policies are thus fault-tolerant policies. We consider the case in which each robot is an autonomous decision maker that is anonymous (i.e., robots are indistinguishable to one another), memoryless (i.e., each robot makes decisions based upon only its current information), and dimensionless (i.e., collision checking is not considered). Each robot has a limited sensing range, and is able to directly estimate the state of only those robots within that sensing range, which induces a network topology for the multi-robot system. We assume that it is not possible for the fault-free robots to identify the faulty robots (e.g., due to the anonymous property of the robots). Our approach provides an efficient computational framework and analysis of algorithms that achieve approximate convergence in the face of faulty robots under a few assumptions on the network topology and sensing sensing abilities.

Bio

Seth Hutchinson received his Ph.D. from Purdue University in 1988. In 1990, he joined the faculty at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, where he is currently a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Coordinated Science Laboratory, and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. He served as associate department head of ECE from 2001 to 2007. Hutchinson currently serves on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Robotics Research and the Journal of Intelligent Service Robotics, and chairs the steering committee of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. He was Founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society’s Conference Editorial Board (2006-2008), and Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transaction on Robotics (2008-2013). He has published more than 200 papers on the topics of robotics and computer vision, and is coauthor of the books Principles of Robot Motion: Theory, Algorithms, and Implementations, published by MIT Press, and Robot Modeling and Control, published by Wiley. Hutchinson is a Fellow of the IEEE.