Multi-Robot Systems

Dr. Antonio Franchi* and Prof. Giuseppe Oriolo**

*LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse, France
**Dipartimento di Ingegneria Informatica, Automatica e Gestionale, Sapienza Università di Roma


Information

schedule
The course starts on April 26, 2019 and ends on May 9, 2019. The exact schedule is the following:

April 26, 14:00-18:00
May 2,
14:00-18:00
May 3, 14:00-18:00
May 6, 17:00-19:00
May 7, 14:00-18:00
May 9, 15:00-17:00

All classes will take place in A5.


office hoursafter class
e-mailoriolo [at] diag [dot] uniroma1 [dot] it

Audience

This 3-credits module is part of Elective in Robotics, a 4-module course offered to students of the Master in "Artificial Intelligence and Robotics" at Sapienza University of Rome. It can also be taken by students of the Master in "Control Engineering" as one of the two modules of Control Problems in Robotics (it cannot be taken by students that have chosen to include Control of Multi-Agent Autonomous Systems in their curriculum).


Objective

The module presents the basic methods for analyzing and controlling multi-robot systems, with applications to teams of UAVs (quadrotors), mobile manipulators and wheeled mobile robots.


Syllabus (preliminary)

Introduction: Examples of application of multi-robot systems, Centralized vs. decentralized architectures.

Mathematical tools: Adjacency graph and matrix, Laplacian, Connectivity and Consensus, Passivity and Lyapunov stability, Interconnection of mechanical systems.

Applications to multi-UAV systems: Formation control with time-varying topology, Formation control with connectivity maintenance, Steady-state behaviors, Bearing-based formation control.

Application to multi-WMR systems:
Cooperative mobile manipulation.

Swarm Robotics

Material

Slides:

Lecture 1
Lecture 2
Lecture 3
Lecture 4
Lecture 5
Swarm Robotics 

Some introductory videos are on these YouTube channels: RoboticsLabSapienza and MPIRobotics.

Textbook: M. Mesbahi and M. Egerstedt, "Graph Theoretic Methods in Multiagent Systems," Princeton University Press, 2010.


Grading       

Any student who has attended at least 2/3 of the lectures can pass this module by either giving a presentation on a certain topic (based on technical papers) or developing a small project (typically involving simulations). For more details, see the main pages of Elective in Robotics or Control Problems in Robotics.


Master Theses at the Robotics Laboratory

Master Theses on the topics studied in this course are available at the DIAG Robotics Lab. More information can be found here.
Questions/comments: oriolo [at] diag [dot] uniroma1 [dot] it