ME4823 Cooperative Control of Multiple Marine Autonomous Vehicles

This course takes students through each stage involved in the design, modeling and evaluation of a multi-robot solutions to current and future naval challenges. The course provides students with an overview of the state-of-the-art in multi-robot control and the theoretical building blocks common to these methods. Students are presented with an authentic multi-robot control challenge which serves as the focus of the remainder of the course. Students are guided through a selection process to formulate multi-robot control techniques appropriate to the specific application. The course culminates with implementation of multi-robot control (in simulation and/or experiment) to quantitatively evaluate performance of student designs. PREREQUISITE: ME3801, ME3201

Prerequisite

ME3801 or consent of Instructor

Lecture Hours

4

Lab Hours

0

Course Learning Outcomes

 At the completion of the course students will be able to:

• Choose a robotic architecture (centralized, distributed, etc.) appropriate for a particular design goal.
• Use the Linux command line for developing robotic application software.
• Use the Robotics Operating System (publish-subscribe message passing, introspection tools) for implementing a multi-robot system.
• Use common ROS packages such as teleoperation, mapping, robot localization, etc.
• Implement high-level command and control (e.g., waypoint guidance, potential field obstacle avoidance, etc.) though a MATLAB, Simulink or Python interface to ROS.

• Design, implement, test and debug a multi-robot experiment.