ROBOTIC PLATFORM FOR TESTING AND VALIDATION OF HETEROGENEOUS AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS IN CONTESTED ENVIRONMENTS
Abstract
The proposed equipment will impact undergraduate and graduate education at the University of Florida, as well as at collaborator institutions and potentially nationwide. Regarding graduate education, we expect doctoral students to use these platforms to develop theoretical results that are experimentally validated and verified. Areas applicable to the proposed platforms include guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) algorithms, network control and optimization techniques, network decision algorithms that are robust to asynchrony and intermittent communications, and autonomy techniques that provide privacy and security. Both the analytical skills and the experimental skills they develop will serve them well in their careers after graduation. Combined, the PIs on this project supervise over 20 PhD students. Past lab alumni have gone on to work in academia, industry, national labs, and DoD research labs including the munitions directorate of AFRL at Eglin Air Force Base, the Missile and Space Intelligence Center at Redstone Arsenal, and the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Panama City, Florida. The proposed equipment features onboard sensory and communication payloads that mirror those used in DoD systems much better than conventional indoor laboratory setups. These capabilities provide opportunities to train students on such systems to meet the future needs of the DoD workforce. We expect to incorporate the proposed equipment into projects in graduate courses such as EML 6934- Network Control Systems, EAS 6350- Nonlinear Control, and EAS 6351- Adaptive Control, as well as the undergraduate course EML 4312- Control of Mechanical Engineering Systems. Students will use ROS to first simulate their behaviors on robots and then run them on physical hardware, and we expect that skills with ROS and robotic hardware will transfer to students’ careers after graduation.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Mar 07, 2023
- Source ID
- FA95502210042
Entities
People
- Matthew Hale
Organizations
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research
- United States Air Force
- University of Florida