A CONTROL SCHEME FOR MEASURE OF PERFORMANCE AND EFFICIENCY OF TACTICAL COOPERATIVE ROBOTS.pdf

A CONTROL SCHEME FOR MEASURE OF PERFORMANCE AND EFFICIENCY OF TACTICAL COOPERATIVE ROBOTS Amir Shirkhodaie Intelligent Tactical Mobility Robotic Research Laboratory Department of Mechanical Manufacturing Engineering Tennessee State University Ashirkhodaie@TNState.edu ABSTRACT We have discussed technical issues regarding supervised world perception modeling and task planning of cooperative mobile robots performing tactical tasks in unstructured environment. We have introduced a hierarchy Supervisory Controller for robust cooperative task deployment of heterogeneous semi- autonomous robotic vehicles. Primarily, we have described functional and modular architecture of the Supervisory Controller and presented our strategies for separation of supervisory functions according to their level abstraction, complexity, precedence, and intelligence. Furthermore, we have discussed control schemes for measure of performance and measure of efficiency of our cooperative robots tested under different task situations. Results indicate the hybrid Supervisory controller performs satisfactorily in most simulated cases. Keywords: Cooperative Robots, Supervisory Control, Measure of Performance, and Measure of Efficiency. 1. INTRODUCTION Cooperative robots are critically important for solving a number of real-world problems. Their applications span from civilian search and rescue missions to military battlefield reconnaissance and surveillance covert operations to deep space scientific research explorations. In very near future, potential commercial applications of cooperative robots are foreseen to be ubiquitous. The cooperative robots while benefit from inherent parallelism, their robust control is both multi-folded and challenging to achieve and sustain reliably. Many different techniques and approaches for mobile robots control have been developed. The proposed control techniques in literature can be, categorically, classified as either deliberative, reactive, or hybrid in n