The deployment of large teams of robots over long time-scales in unstructured environments poses problems that are fundamentally different from those faced by robots deployed in factories or other controlled settings, where operating conditions exhibit only limited variability, power is readily available, and regularly scheduled maintenance routines ensure that minor technical problems do not accumulate to produce catastrophic failures. But, in long-duration autonomy, robots face a whole new set of challenges and in the UCI Robot Ecology Lab we study this tight coupling between robot (animal) and its environment (habitat).
Key Research Areas
Mutualisms in Multi-Agent Robotics
Collaboration across species is common in nature. This project leverages ecological principles in terms of robot systems in order to understand how, when, and why it is beneficial to collaborate.
Heterogeneous Coverage Control
By distributing teams of robots across a domain, the area can be effectively covered. This project investigates how such coverage mechanisms can be designed for robot teams with heterogeneous sensing, mobility, and communication capabilities.
Environmental Monitoring
Long-duration autonomy is the study of how to deploy robots over long temporal scales; significantly longer than what can be supported by a single battery charge. This project investigates how to deploy such robots in natural environments in order to monitor their micro-climates.