Coordination of Aerial and Spacecraft Robotics
In the last decade, the field of aerial robotics has experienced fast-growth especially for the case of multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). High-performance micro-scale processors and high-efficiency sensors have helped to increase the commercial scope of these flying robots. Aerial robots are increasingly being considered to carry out complex missions within unstructured and dynamic environments. For instance, aerial transportation is essential in emergency rescue missions, as well as for time-critical cargo delivery tasks (e.g., medicines, blood, and so forth). Moreover, aerial robotic relays are capable of transporting small ground mobile sensors and expanding the communication capabilities of the whole system. Similarly, spacecraft robotics has seen a significant increase in activity recently. However, these systems may be vulnerable to malfunctions or malicious attacks, which may result in severe damage to the agent network and ultimately system failure. To address this, there is a continued challenge for developing algorithms that are resilient to malfunctioning or adversarial attacks in order to mitigate the impact of these effects and quickly recover the multi-agent system. In the first part of the talk, I present a methodology that enables aerial vehicles to detect, track, and neutralize potentially dangerous small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS). The second part of the seminar discusses some challenging problems that arise in designing resilient spacecraft formation control under malfunctioning communications. We describe a control algorithm that is resilient to unknown, non-cooperative agents, which inject unreliable information to their neighbors, and drives each agent to a desired formation.