| Description | Title: Localization and Coordination of Mobile Robots in Strong Geophysical Flows
Speaker: Zhuoyuan Song
Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Hawaii at Manoa
Tuesday, June 2, 2020 @ 3:30pm
Recording - www.youtube.com…
Abstract:
Intelligent mobile robots are becoming an essential tool for large-scale atmospheric and oceanic sensing and monitoring. The capabilities to autonomously navigate and sense dynamic fluid environments are fundamental to miniature mobile robots in strong geophysical flows such as hurricanes or ocean currents. Small mobile robots are often limited in sensing and actuation capacities, making them more susceptible to environmental influences than their larger counterparts. Conventionally, background flows are considered as adversarial disturbances that negatively affect the navigation, control, and planning of mobile robots. In this talk, we will discuss the role of background flows as ubiquitous navigational references and transportation "highways" for individual and networked autonomous robots.The first part of this talk will focus on a flow-aided localization approach where background flow forecasts are utilized as navigational references in mitigating the accumulative error of an inertial navigation system. We will discuss how this approach has motivated the concept of fluid-based simultaneous localization and mapping. The second part of the talk will focus on a distributed multi-robot flocking method that treats robot swarms as fluids. We will discuss how this flocking method enables nearly fuel-optimal guidance for large robot swarms in strong background flows. Finally, we will talk about the vision of establishing an open- access field marine robotics testbed and the recent development of subsea autonomous docking. Speaker Bio:
Zhuoyuan Song is currently an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Florida in 2014 and 2018, respectively. His research interests include underwater navigation, multi-robot systems, and marine robotics. |
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