REU Site: Undergraduate Robotics Research in Human-Swarm Interaction

West Virginia University Research Corporation, Morgantown WV

Investigators

Abstract

This Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site at West Virginia University (WVU) will allow eight undergraduate students each year, mostly from the Appalachian region, to perform state-of-the-art robotics research. Through challenging them with real-world problems, this project will provide training, mentorship and support to undergraduate students so that they can become independent researchers. The overall project management strategy will follow the spirit of swarm intelligence: encouraging the frequent interactions among a diverse group of undergraduate students to achieve something that might not otherwise be achievable by the individuals alone - for example, advancing the state-of-the-art in human-swarm interaction research). Throughout the project, the faculty and graduate student mentors will encourage creative thinking and frequent interactions to enhance the students' problem solving skills. This will allow them to transition from passive learners to independent thinkers of the future. This effort in turn will contribute to the growth of a high-quality and diverse US scientific workforce in the important area of robotics. The intellectual focus of this project is to allow one human operator to effectively manage a large robot swarm to achieve desired global objectives. Tailored around a swarm system inspired by the cooperative thermal soaring and foraging behaviors of hawks, three sub-projects will be conducted by undergraduate students during this REU project. First, a swarm testing environment with 50 custom designed robots will be developed. Second, distributed, non-hierarchical agent-level interaction rules that will allow the emergence of desirable robot swarm behaviors will be investigated. Third, novel human-swarm interaction modes for managing a large self-organized robot swarm without using a direct command and control structure between the operator and robots will be invented and experimentally demonstrated. Through these efforts, the undergraduate students will have the opportunity to work as a team in performing both fundamental research and hands-on experiments. The successful completion of the project will enable many potential robot applications such as search and rescue, environmental monitoring, and robotic mining and construction. The outcomes from this project will be broadly disseminated through demonstration videos, peer-reviewed publications, and open sharing of the developed software. This project is jointly funded by the Information and Intelligent Systems Division of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.