Abstract: 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 provides tales of joy and disaster from using 90 of
these platforms for our research, a freshman engineering systems course,
and graduate robotics lab.
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