Projects
From MARHES
Research Interests
Mobile Sensor Networks
The objective of this research is to develop an adaptive network of distributed sensors capable of accomplishing a wide range of tasks ranging from retrieving, manipulating and synthesizing information to identifying, and locating physical objects. These mobile sensors may some day be employed for a wide range of tasks from fighting forest fires, to cleaning up oil spills. They can perform a variety of critical search and rescue missions in hostile territory such as a battlefield or the site of a terrorist attack.
Cooperative Control of Unmanned Vehicles
As small, low cost and expendable unmanned vehicles (UAV, UGV) are available, they can be used for many functions such as reconnaissance, search, over-the-horizon communications, etc. In this project we propose to develop the methodology and the support software for the coordination of heterogeneous teams of unmanned vehicles.
Hybrid Systems
The area of hybrid systems is an attractive topic that, due to its interdisciplinary nature, does not have a body of rigorous results to date. There are many fundamental mathematical problems that have not been addressed yet and require deeper investigation. Applications of hybrid systems include embedded systems, biological systems, automated highway systems, air-traffic controllers, communications networks, and robotics.
Current Projects
CAREER: Coordination of Dynamic Networks - A Hybrid System Approach
- Description: A dynamic network consists of spatially distributed dynamic nodes (e.g., autonomous vehicles, mobile sensors) which are coordinated by common set of goals and possible dynamic interaction between the nodes. There are many applications where a dynamic network may be more suitable than a single vehicle, especially where a distributed system of sensors is advantageous.
- New developments in complex networks of interacting systems like teams of autonomous vehicles/robots for homeland security, search and rescue operations, disaster relief operations, multi-targeting/multi-platform battlefield groups, unmanned air vehicle systems, intelligent highway/vehicle systems, wireless surveillance networks, and elsewhere place severe demands on the design of cooperative control schemes and communication strategies in the presence of changing environment. This project will develop methodologies to facilitate the design of this class of systems. Also, these methodologies will be verified and evaluated on a multi-vehicle experimental testbed.
- Sponsor: This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. ECS-0348637
- PI: Rafael Fierro
- Duration: Apr 1, 2004 - March 31, 2009
- Disclaimer "Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation."
- Link: http://www.nsf.gov/home/crssprgm/career/start.htm
Hierarchical Hybrid Control of Multi-Vehicle Systems
- Description: This project focuses on developing a software toolkit for hierarchical modeling distributed multi-vehicle systems. This toolkit allows a modular and hierarchical approach to programming deliberative and reactive behaviors in distributed autonomous operation. Formal definitions for sequential composition, hierarchical composition, and parallel composition allow the bottom-up development of complex hybrid systems. There is an urgent need to develop the methodologies for the analysis and design of complex multi-vehicle systems. This project will provide the software and analytical tools to alleviate this need.
- Sponsor: This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. CCR-0311460
- PI: Rafael Fierro
- Students: Carlo Branca
- Duration: Sep 1, 2003 - Aug 31, 2005
- Disclaimer "Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation."
Robotic Games
- Description: The goal of this project is to explore various aspects of robot/human interaction and help encourage children's interest in engineering. The project will be specifically targeted toward native American children. Delving somewhat into the field of psychology, researchers will examine this culture and develop a set of robotic games that allow children to interact with a group of robots. As the project develops, groups of students will be invited to take part in an afternoon program which provides a short description of robotics and engineering. Following this, the children will be introduced to the robots by taking part in a series of educational and entertaining games. The platform for this project will be the Evolution Robotics Scorpion. This flexible platform provides an excellent set of existing behaviors. By harnessing these behaviors, this project will be able to more rapidly develop a high-quality robot human interface.
- Sponsor: NSF
- PI(s): Rafael Fierro
- Students: James McClintock, Brent Perteet
- Duration: May 1, 2004 - ongoing
Adaptation and Learning at All Levels in Intelligent Robots Teams for Reconnaissance, Surveillance and Battlefield Assessment
- Description: Robots will be crucial to future military information-gathering missions. We propose Adaptation and Learning at all Levels (AL2) to enable the integration of key technologies like perception, control, and learning. This framework allows for a modular and hierarchical approach to implementing deliberative and reactive behaviors in teams of autonomous vehicles. We will develop metrics to quantify the success of the techniques proposed and these metrics will be integrated into the machine learning process.
- Sponsor: DoD - ARO (Army Research Office)
- This material is based upon work supported by, or in part by, the U. S. Army Research Laboratory and the U. S. Army Research office under grant number DAAD19-03-1-0142 (through University of Oklahoma)
- PI(s): Rafael Fierro
- Students: (OSU): 2 PhD, 2 MS, 2 undergrad
- Duration: July 1, 2003 - June 30, 2006
The MARHES TXT Modular Mobile Robot
Description: We are developing a flexible COTS mobile platform to support multi-vehicle coordination research at the MARHES lab.
- Sponsor: OSU
- PI: Rafael Fierro
- Students: EzzAldeen Edwan, Justin Clark, José Sánchez, Kenny Walling
- Duration: Jan 2002 - ongoing
Senior Design Projects
The MARHES lab often sponsors undergraduate senior design projects related to work that is being done in the lab.
Past Projects
Software Enable Control for UAV Formation Flight
- Description: Advances in information technologies and networked control systems are enabling an increasing interest in multi-vehicle systems equipped with embedded processors and sensors, and communications capabilities. The technology incorporated into unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) fleets to allow their use in applications such as intelligence gathering, surveillance, and communication will be one of the core competencies of the future unmanned vehicle systems. In this project, we will design a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation platform where novel software-enabled control strategies for UAV formation flight can be tested.
- Sponsor: Oklahoma NASA EPSCoR
- PI: Rafael Fierro
- Students: Jose Sanchez, Amanda Filbeck
- Collaborator: Dr. Mark Motter (NASA Langley Research Center)
- Duration: Feb. 1, 2003 - Aug. 31, 2003
24/7 Remote Monitoring of Work Zones and Intelligent Decision Support System for the Safety of Motorists and Highway Construction Workers
- Description: The ever-increasing demand for improving roadways to handle growing traffic has resulted in dramatic increases in the number of roadway construction and repair projects. To accommodate fast completion times of construction projects, many of these projects are carried out night and day adjacent to high-speed traffic, exposing workers and commuters to work zone hazards. In this research, we propose to design, implement, deploy, and evaluate the effectiveness of a monitoring system that will be built using off-the-shelf technology with little or no modification together with an intelligent decision support system to provide dynamic and proactive information related to work zone traffic conditions to reduce accidents. In the next section, we present our detailed description of the research project and the results obtained.
- Sponsor: Oklahoma Transportation Center
- PI(s): R. Fierro (OSU), D. Hougen (OU), and S. Radhakrishnan (OU)
- Duration: Feb 2002 - Sep 2002
Past Collaborations
MARS: Software for Controlling Multiple Autonomous Robots
The goal of this project is to develop a framework and the support tools for the deployment of multiple autonomous robots in an unstructured and unknown environment with applications to reconnaissance, surveillance, target acquisition, and the removal of explosive ordnance.
MoBIES: DIVES: Design, Implementation, and Validation of Embedded Software
The goal of this project is to develop a methodology and toolkit for design of embedded software for multi-agent hybrid systems. The methodology will cover various design stages, including modeling, simulation, analysis, implementation, and monitoring. The methodology will be based on formal modular and hierarchical semantics of multi-agent hybrid systems.
Modeling the Simplex Architecture using CHARON
We have been working on modeling the Simplex architecture in CHARON. CHARON is a Java-based high-level language for modular specification of hybrid systems. A hybrid system is described by a set of agents communicating over a set of shared variables in an asynchronous way. The agents may be grouped together in a hierarchical way into composed agents starting from the most primitive ones called atomic agents. Information flow inside a composed agent may be hidden to the outside world. The grouping of agents into composed agents gives the structure of the hybrid system. On the other hand, the Simplex architecture provides a formal method to dynamically update software modules (e.g., controllers) maintaining system reliability.
Media Links
Current Media
UAV Hardware-In-The-Loop Media
Links
Some slides describing our work on
