Cooperative Wall-climbing Robots for Surveillance and Target Tracking
Project Status: Active (Started: 2004)
Research Description
Leveraging prior work and expertise of two PIs (Dr. Xiao in robotics and control , Dr. Zhu in computer vision ), we propose to develop a modular, reconfigurable, wall-climbing robotic system and to investigate intelligent control methods and vision algorithms to control and coordinate a team of such robots to perform various defense, security, and inspection missions. First, the modeling of individual wall-climber module, as well as the cooperative relationship of a group of such robots will be developed. Second, intelligent control methods will be designed to effectively coordinate the robot team to achieve a common goal (e.g., self-deployment, dynamic view planning, and object tracking, etc.) in a fault tolerant fashion. Third, based on our previous research in computer vision, new vision algorithms for scene understanding, object tracking and localization will be developed by taking advantage the climbing feature of multiple wall-climbers in 3-D environments.
Sponsors
DOD Army Research Office (Award number: W911NF-05-1-0011), Cooperative Wall-climbing Robots in 3-D Environment for Surveillance and Target Tracking, 11/01/04-11/14/2008, PI: J. Xiao, Co-PI: Z. Zhu