Distributed Algorithms for Robot Recovery, Angular Coordinate Systems, and Low-Cost Robots: An Overview of the Rice Multi-Robot Systems Lab

In this talk we present results from three different projects: 1. A distributed recovery algorithm to extract a multi-robot system from complex environments. The goal is to maintain network connectivity while allowing efficient recovery. Our approach uses a maximal-leaf spanning tree as a communication and navigation backbone, and routes robots along this tree to the goal. Simulation and experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of this approach. 2. Angular coordinate systems can provide robots with useful network geometry from very low-cost hardware. We introduce "scale-free coordinates" as a coordinate system of intermediate power and design complexity. We show that it can estimate low-quality network geometry, but can still be used to build a useful motion controller with interesting limitations. 3. We introduce the "r-one" robot, a low-cost design suitable for research, education, and outreach. We provide tales of joy and disaster from using 90 of these platforms for our research, a freshman engineering systems course, and graduate robotics lab.

James McLurkin is an Assistant Professor at Rice University in the Department of Computer Science. Current interests include using distributed computational geometry for multi-robot configuration estimation and control, and defining complexity metrics that quantify the relationships between algorithm execution time, inter-robot communication bandwidth, and robot speed. Previous positions include lead research scientist at iRobot corporation, where McLurkin was the manager of the DARPA-funded Swarm project. Results included the design and construction of 112 robots and distributed configuration control algorithms, including robust software to search indoor environments. He holds a S.B. in Electrical Engineering with a Minor in Mechanical Engineering from M.I.T., a M.S. in Electrical Engineering from University of California, Berkeley, and a S.M. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from M.I.T.