Research

How to make resilient robots for operations in dangerous environments?

• A throwable, jumping robot for firefighting applications

What are the fundamental concepts that constitute a swarm behavior, and how to combine them? How to identify and fix errors and bugs in a swarm behavior?

• Buzz, a programming language for heterogeneous robot swarms
• Space- and time-dynamic distributed hash tables
• In-network computation of swarm functions
• Debugging infrastructure for robot swarms
• Machine-learning and bug detection
• Augmented-reality-based development and testing

How to harmonize the individual needs of robots (e.g., battery limitations, completion of assigned tasks), with swarm-level coordination requirements (e.g., connectivity maintenance)?

• Scalable network deployment and maintenance
• Energy-constrained coordination
• Spatially-aware task allocation

How can a robot swarm construct a shared representation of complex aspects of the environment, despite severe limitations in sensing and computational capabilities?

• Decentralized pattern detection with noisy sensors and lying robots

Which behavioral traits can a swarm exhibit to interact with a human operator efficiently? Conversely, what kind of commands can a human operator give a swarm, for the swarm to execute them effectively?

• Hybrid goal- and robot-oriented interfaces
• Tactile interfaces