Multiple-Robot Systems for USAR: Key Design Attributes and Deployment Issues

Hardware Design and Deployment Issues in UHF RFID Systems

Recently, radio frequency identification (RFID) have created emerging applications for tracking, sensing, and identifying various targets in wide-ranging areas such as supply chain, transportation, airline baggage handling, medical and biological industry, and homeland security. RFID systems with a variety of radio frequencies and techniques have been introduced. Among them, ultra-high frequenc...

Persuasive Systems Design: Key Issues, Process Model, and System Features

Integrated Design, Deployment and Inference for Robot Ecologies

Evolutionary computation (EC) has been used extensively for the automated design of robot controllers (see [4] for an overview); more recently, robots themselves have been automatically designed using evolutionary techniques [5], [1]: the morphology and controller of the robot is evolved together to produce robots that exhibit increasing efficacy at performing the desired task. Evolutionary tec...

Distributed Robot Ensemble Control for Deployment to Multiple Sites

We address the ensemble synthesis of distributed control policies to allocate a team of homogenous robots to a collection of spatially distributed tasks. We assume individual robot controllers are derived via the sequential composition of individual task controllers and develop an appropriate macroscopic description of the team dynamics. A feedback control strategy is synthesized using the macr...

A Reconfigurable USAR Robot Designed for Traversing Complex 3D Terrain

The use of robotics in Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) is growing steadily from their initial inception during the 2001 World Trade Centre incident. These first USAR robots were adapted from robots intended for tasks such as duct inspection and bomb disposal and proved useful for exploring voids (spaces within the collapsed structure) deemed too dangerous or too small for either canine or human ...