MAVERICK Robot Movies


[BITE] [Formations] [Single Operator, Multiple Robots] [Robots Dance] [Adaptive Foraging] [Media Coverage] [Other Movies]

BITE Architecture for Multi-Robot Teams

BITE (Bar Ilan Teamwork Engine) is a distributed architecture for physical robots, which incorporates task synchronization and task allocation services. BITE's key novelty is its separation of taskwork and teamwork protocols, allowing the robots to use different task allocation and synchronization protocols at different times. BITE was built as part of Inna Frenkel's MSc thesis, and its development continues in the MAVERICK laboratory.

Formation Maintenance (Coordinated Movement)

Formation maintenance is a canonical multi-robot task, that involves multiple robots moving together, in a coordinated manner, to maintain a given geometric shape. Formation maintenance is interesting to us because it is almost purely social: To carry out the task, most robots in the team must concern themselves almost completely with monitoring their peers.

As the basis for our work, we use a formation control method called separation-bearing control (SBC). Each robot (except for the leader) monitors the distance an angle to one other robot. In the movies below, this is done by the Sony AIBO robots by using their cameras to detect the colored rears of the other robots. The robots use their range sensors to measure distance.

As part of her MSc work in the MAVERICK group, Ruti Glick has developed a dynamic separation-bearing controller, which allows the robots to switch their monitoring target to address sensor failures. This resulted in a very significant increase in robustness and accuracy.

Formation maintenance movies

Single Operator, Multiple Robots

A current challenge in multi-robot systems is how to allow a single human operator to command/control/supervise multiple robots. Most investigations in this area have focused on allowing the operator to switch his or her attention from one robot to another. However, this does not work well in tight-coordination tasks, where all robots are dependent on each other.

As part of his MSc thesis, Yehuda Elmaliach has developed an interface (the relation tool) that allows control of multiple robots in tight-coordination tasks, by showing the operator their spatial configuration. The work was tested with up to 25 human operator, and results in dramatic improvements in the quality of task performance.

Sony AIBOs dance "Hands Up!"

Work by Inna Shmukler, a part of her undergraduate final project. Note the differences created by the use of synchronized and un-synchronized motions.

Adaptive Coordination in Foraging

Foraging is a task where robots spread around an area to collect static and moving targets (pucks), and bring them to a goal location. Many different coordination techniques have been suggested for foraging. However, it turns out that it is difficult to predict which method should be used. PhD student Avi Rosenfeld has examine a simple--but highly effective--adaptive coordination method for deciding dynamically on the coordination method used. The key idea is to allow robots to switch coordination methods on-the-fly.

Media Coverage

Other robot movies