Robot Ecology: Technology should not be invasive

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).