Robotics and Automation Laboratory
About
The Robotics and Automation Laboratory was founded in August 2005 by Prof. Yi Guo and is engaged in research in autonomous mobile robots and control systems. The laboratory develops fundamental understanding in autonomous mobility and robot cooperation, and provides computational algorithms for increasing cooperative mobility of mobile robotic systems. Control system synthesis spans multi-agent systems, communication systems, electric power systems, and nano-scale systems.
Robotic and automation systems are needed for a variety of applications in civil and military missions. The application domains include security, surveillance and reconnaissance, planetary exploration, search and rescue, cleanup of hazardous waste, mining, transportation, manufacturing, rehabilitation and service, agricultural industry, biomedical industry, ocean and coastal engineering, and aerospace engineering.
Faculty
Publications
See Yi Guo's publications here.
Research Areas
Cooperative and autonomous mobile robotics
Nonlinear systems and control
Distributed sensor networks
Nano-scale systems and control
Distributed control of power systems
Projects
Having well-designed robotic systems to assist people in public crowd environments such as shopping malls, museums, and campus buildings benefits society economically. More important, in life-threatening emergency situations, robot-assisted evacuation could save lives by reducing congestion and preventing crowd stampede. We develop real time re-configurable crowd control by interacting robots, which replaces costly infrastructure modification for local crowd regulation. Machine learning based methods are used to learn human-robot interaction for effective robot navigation and pedestrian guidance in humans’ environments. The research is supported by NSF Award 1527016.
Marine pollution is one of the major environment hazards as it not only causes long-term damage to the marine environment but also leads to serious economic losses in coastal areas. The project has provided novel algorithmic and software support for collective sensing, and addressed a pressing real-world need for better sensing of underwater hydrocarbon plumes. We have developed distributed tracking control of dynamic ocean pollution plumes using multiple cooperating robots. The multi-robot plume tracking control we developed have been tested in coastal field experiments at Makai Research Pier in Oahu, Hawaii. The project has also developed open-source simulation and emulation tools based on existing robotic simulator platforms. The results may also potentially benefit other environmental monitoring tasks with underlying diffusion and advection processes, such as weather event tracking and climate prediction.
The research is supported by NSF Award 1218155.
The integration of physics principles of macroscopic mechanical systems with control mechanisms and control theoretical principles has a rich history, enabling new applications and establishing new directions for research. More recently, technologies have moved into the nano-scale regime, with basic electronic, optoelectronic, sensor, mechanical, and other components enabling many new applications emerging. The application of these nano-mechanical structures will require an integration of the new physics principles for their behavior with new control theoretical principles appropriate for the new behaviors exhibited by nano-structures.
A particular topic we're interested in is atomic-scale friction control. While traditionally, controlling frictional properties in a desired way is achieved by chemical means, a recent idea in controlling the system mechanically by applying small perturbations to accessible elements of the sliding system was shown effective through microscopic level experiments. We apply advanced feedback control theory to change frictional characteristics through surface sliding. We collaborate with experimental groups at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to conduct AFM experiments for verification of the developed control schemes. Currently, we study how to reduce friction force through normal (perpendicular to the surface) surface vibration, which is supported by NSF Award 0825613.
Some of our results are published in the following peer-reviewed journals:
Y. Guo, Z. Qu, Y. Braiman, Z. Zhang and Jacob Barhen, "Nanotribology and nanoscale friction: Smooth sliding through feedback control", IEEE Control Systems Magazine, Vol. 28, No. 6, pp.92-100, Dec. 2008.
Y. Guo and Z. Qu, "Control of Frictional Dynamics of A One-Dimensional Particle Array",
Automatica, Vol. 44, pp. 2560-2569, 2008.
Y. Guo, Z. Qu, and Z. Zhang, "Lyapunov stability and precise control of the frictional dynamics of a one-dimensional particle array",
Physical Review B, Vol. 73, No. 9, Paper ID 094118, 2006.
The remarkable advances in networking technologies (both wired and wireless networks) are enabling a wide range of new, man-made systems based on sophisticated and low cost distributed components cooperating across low cost and high-speed data networks. Although useful cooperative behaviors have been established in these man-made systems, the full potential has not yet been met and the principles that will allow more sophisticated and robust distributed systems have yet to be fully developed. For example, is there a generalized theoretic framework that can clarify the convergence property of complex distributed cooperating systems? Is there a mission-oriented control design methodology for such? We investigate control problems facing cooperative and collective behaviors of distributed systems and use the example of distributed mobile robot systems to explore the underlying principles.
The distributed robotic platform that we use includes Pioneer series robots from Mobile Robots Inc., E-puck mini-robots from GCtronic, and Create robots from iRobot.
Selected Publications:
H. Wang and Y. Guo, "Synchronization on a segment without localization: algorithm, applications, and robot experiments", International Journal of Intelligent Control and Systems, Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 9-17, 2010.
Y. Lu and Y. Guo, "Multi-agent Flocking with Formation in a Constrained Environment", Journal of Control Theory and Applications, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 151-159, 2010.
J. Wang, Z. Qu, Y. Guo, and J. Yang, "A reduced-order analytical solution to mobile robot trajectory generation in the presence of moving obstacles", International Journal of Robotics and Automation, Vol. 24, No. 4, pp. 2982-2997, 2009.
In the same way microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) technologies have provided new medical devices in the 80s, recent development in nanotechnology is enabling the manufacturing of nanobiosensors and actuators to improve cell biology interfaces and biomolecular applications. As a consequence, nanorobotics and nanomedicine have evolved from pure science fiction to a rapid growing research area which may lead to a real implementation in a few decades. In future decades, the principle focus in medicine will shift from medical science to medical engineering, and the design of microscopic and molecular machines will be the consequent result of techniques provided from the biomedical knowledge gained in the last century. Supported by NSF, we have been developing teaching materials and laboratory modules in micro/nano-robots for biomedical applications. We also plan to investigate control challenges facing bio-nanorobotics, and to develop novel control methodologies towards directed motion and transportation of objects at the atomic scale.
Selected Publications:
Y. Guo, S. Zhang, H. Man, and A. Ritter, "Meeting the educational challenge in micro/nano-robotics for biomedical applications", Proceedings of ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, Louisville, Kentucky, June 21-24, 2010, to appear.
Y. Guo, W. Zhang and Z. Wang, "Directed motion of an atomic scale engine and stability analysis", Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE), Toronto, Canada, August 21-24, 2010.
Snake robots have the advantages of modular reconfigurability and high terrain adaptability. Snake robots on the market are limited to remote controlled toys. There's a great need to develop autonomous snake robots equipped with sensors for applications such as search and rescue. We design and develop prototype for a snake robot that can make motions including climbing, side winding, and rolling.
Video of locomotion of a modular snake robot developed in our lab
Publication:
S. Zhang and Y. Guo, "Bio-inspired locomotion for a modular snake robot",
Proceedings of SPIE Defense, Security, and Sensing, Vol. 7321, pp. 73201E1-E10, Orlando, FL, April 2009.
(Supported by ARMY ARDEC, 2008-2009)
In order to achieve autonomous deployment of mobile sensors such as service robots in tactical mobile sensor networks, it is critical that the service robots can position themselves and further to localize sensors, monitor their activities, and track the movements of sensors. Collaborating with my colleagues at Stevens, we address the above challenges including localization/tracking of service robots/sensor nodes, deployment and reconfiguration of mobile sensor/robot networks, and intruder detection. In particular, we focus on developing effective deployment algorithm and decentralized control in the current fiscal year.
(Supported by ARMY ARDEC, 2007-2008)
Contrary to traditional “open loop”, passive sensor networks, we propose to develop a new sensor network architecture that employs multiple sensor-network-friendly service robots to implement an actuation mechanism and thus closes the loop. The service robots can provide both logistic and network services. Examples of the logistic services include:
Examples of the network services include:
Network connectivity, or topology management
Hierarchical routing
Time synchronization, etc.
When these service robots are deployed together with a large quantity of sensors, the resulted active sensor network will achieve many desirable merits, such as adaptability, self healing, responsiveness and longer lifetime.
Sensing coverage control
Sensor power supply
Sensor calibration, etc.
Examples of the network services include:
Network connectivity, or topology management
Hierarchical routing
Time synchronization, etc.
When these service robots are deployed together with a large quantity of sensors, the resulted active sensor network will achieve many desirable merits, such as adaptability, self healing, responsiveness and longer lifetime.
(Supported by ARMY ARDEC, 2006-2007)
Many ground military tasks can be accomplished by employment of intelligent cooperative mobile robots, such as surveillance, reconnaissance, and target acquisition. Cooperative robotic systems provide large ground coverage and can map complex environments more rapidly and completely. This project is to develop a cooperative multi-robot system with the capability of situation awareness and response to a dynamic environment. By designing a biological inspired behavior model, this multi-robot system can work in a more effective way with reduced energy of the overall system. This system can be used as a test bed for different communication systems and sensor technologies.
Y. Guo, M. Hohil, and S. V. Desai, “Bio-inspired Motion Planning Algorithms for Autonomous Robots Facilitating Greater Plasticity for Security Applications”, SPIE Europe Symposium on Security and Defence, Unmanned/Unattended Sensors and Sensor Networks IV, Florence, Italy, Sep. 2007.
Y. Guo, Y. Long and W. Sheng, "Global Trajectory Generation for Nonholonomic Robots in Dynamic Environments," Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Roma, Italy, April 2007.