Title: Deployment Planning for Multiple Marsupial Robots

Date & Time: Thursday, September 16th at 10:00 am

Abstract: Multi-robot systems are versatile and extremely capable of exploration tasks in complex environments. Increasingly sophisticated planners, which incorporate new features of a multi-robot system, are necessary for the operation of the systems. Marsupial robots are multi-robot systems consisting of a carrier robot (e.g., a ground vehicle), which is highly capable and has a long mission duration, and at least one passenger robot (e.g., a short-duration aerial vehicle) transported by the carrier. These heterogeneous robot systems are more flexible than traditional homogeneous multi-robot systems in handling the constraints of a complex environment. However, the physical coupling of a carrier robot and passenger robots requires planners that are capable of accounting for passenger robot deployment planning in exploration. In this thesis, we present two algorithms for deploying passenger robots from marsupial robot systems, culminating into a generalized deployment framework.

Committee: Dr. Geoffrey Hollinger, Dr. Julie Adams, Dr. Kagan Tumer, Dr. Bogdan Strimbu