Individual robots do individual tasks. They don’t work together. They work separately and there’s a reason for that. It hasn’t been done before. In the field of robotics, only recently have researchers started to develop a theoretical framework to allow robots to work and solve problems cooperatively. Scientists are just beginning to understand how to design algorithms that make groups of robots exhibit global collective behaviors from simple, individual actions.
Photo: UNM Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering Herbert Tanner
UNM Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering Herbert Tanner wants to take this goal one step further. With the help of a $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, he is investigating how different robots can learn how to combine their different capabilities and solve problems that none of them can tackle on their own.
Tanner’s grant is a Faculty Early Career Development award in the field of robotics, provided by the Information and Intelligent Systems Division of the Computer Science and Engineering Directorate of NSF. This is basically a bet by the U.S. government that Tanner and his students will find a way to begin solving some of the very difficult details involved in programming robots so that they can work as a team.
Tanner is currently working with doctoral student Wenqi Zhang to provide an outline that lays out what is not known. Tanner says his work with Zhang on the unknown will show what is missing in the theoretical area.
Zhang is using a simple puzzle - the kind children can slide tiles around on to make a sequence of numbers - as a starting point. She is looking at what it would take for robots to work together to solve the puzzle. For example, how would they move the tiles, how would they choose which tiles to move, how would they go about planning a way to solve the puzzle. As part of her doctoral work, she will list the gaps in scientific theory that would stop the robots from solving the puzzle together.
As the work progresses, Tanner hopes to put together swarms of robots that can act as a team, communicate and allocate tasks among themselves, and sort through possible solutions to find a plan of action and execute a task. Ultimately he believes the robots could be used for applications ranging from search and rescue efforts, where they could be sent into difficult environments to look for people, to autonomous construction of structures in space without human intervention or guidance.
Media Contact: Karen Wentworth, (505) 277-5627; e-mail: kwent2@unm.edu
Posted by scarr at August 14, 2007 06:33 PM