Scalable underwater communication and Haptic feedback (for full title please refer to abstract)

Scalable underwater communication for large scale swarms
and
Haptic feedback for hovering vehicle control

Abstract:
This talk will discuss two robotics research projects from the
Australian National University.
The first part of the talk will present results of the Serafina project
at the ANU, which aims to create large scale swarms of small submersible
robots. Apart from the many challenges that are common to all underwater
platforms, the key points for large underwater swarms are scalable real
time communication, and relative localisation between the vehicles. This
talk will focus on the communication. It will discuss why short range
links are beneficial in swarm applications, present theoretical results
on global information exchange in the swarm, and two purpose-made time
division multiple access (TDMA) algorithms that achieve fast local and
global information exchange, adapt very quickly to changes in the
network topology, and scale linearly in the number of nodes.
The second part of the talk will present the current state of a new
research project on how to use haptic feedback to facilitate
teleoperation of hovering vehicles. The project is currently in an
exploratory phase, investigating various haptic modalities, sensors and
control schemes, to find answers to how haptic feedback can help remote
control operators of varying experience levels, which types of haptic
feedback are viable from a robotics perspective, and which types of
feedback are acceptable to pilots/operators. Preliminary tests with a
quad rotor flying robot are presented, using a Novint Falcon low-cost 3D
haptic device. A further aspect of this project is to investigate the
use of spherical optic flow as a sensor modality for collision
avoidance and haptic feedback. The talk will discuss some early results
and experiments conducted on a land based holonomic robot, and briefly
discuss current challenges of using vision for flying vehicles in a
teleoperation framework.


Bio:
Felix Schill studied computer science at the University of Karlsruhe
(Diplom der Informatik, 2003), with additional courses in electrical
engineering and microsystems. He completed his PhD on submarine robotics
and swarm communication methods at The Australian National University in
the Autonomous Underwater Vehicles Group in July 2007. Previous research
includes the areas of mobile robotic platforms, humanoid robots and
computer vision. His current research is on haptic feedback for
teleoperation of hovering robots (helicopters, quad-rotor flyers).
Research interests are field robotics and embedded systems, with a
strong emphasis on experimentation and a thorough understanding of both
theoretical and practical problems.