The lab was featured by the RobotCluster, the Danish national innovation network of robotics, automation and intelligent mechanical systems. For info (in Danish), click on here For a Google translated English version, click on here:
Water puppetry is a Vietnamese art performance where puppets made of wood and lacquered perform on water. Characteristic of puppets are usually expressed through its face and motion controlled by the puppeteers who are hidden behind the screen. Performance of the puppets are very diverse as they can move, dance, dive, fly, and even breathe fire. A play of water puppets reveals daily life of Vietnamese farmers reflecting the culture and spirits of Vietnamese people, the Red Delta River civilization. Today I watched a VTV show named Cultures, Events and Personage about a story of the artist, Chu Luong. He is an artist of the water puppetry, whose life is for the art. He told about his passion of the water puppetry, the working condition of the puppeteers, the status of the water puppetry in Vietnam, impact of the water puppetry introducing Vietnamese culture to the world and of course his puppets. As he said, soul of the puppets is mostly expressed on its face. This information together with my awareness of the body motion of the water puppets seen in past triggered a crazy idea in my mind about how to embed robotics in the water puppets. As seen, the puppet is a rigid body with very few degree of freedom. I do not know why there are only few (I have to ask puppeteers), but I guess that the puppeteers can only control the puppets with a limited few degree of freedom, especially standing in water and hidden behind the screen. However, I strongly believe that the puppet with high degree of freedom in their body reveals more meaning through their body motion. The robotic technology embedded in the puppets might: - issue more control degree for the puppeteers - allow sophisticated motion of the puppets - synchronize the puppets' degree of freedom along with the puppeteers control - and if all the puppets are programmed to perform a play, the control role of the puppeteers is released and they can freely act as a DJ in musics to add their feeling to the performance stream.
One thing I am wondering is is I do no know whether this creative changes the traditional property of the water puppetry. But I know, it is definitely a crazy idea . Will see!
We have another accepted paper in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics (Robio 2010). The paper is about quantitative analysis for selection of distributed control of robot swarm.
We have an accepted paper in the 10th International Symposium in Distributed Autonomous Robotics System (DARS 2010). Simon and (Rene maybe) will go to give a poster presentation in Lausanne, Switzerland. This paper will appear as a book chapter in Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics Series. Good news!
- The first group will work with new robots for a project: "Dancing with robots". At the end, we expect that the robots will response to human body acting whist maintaining their attitude automatically (mainly heading synchronization in this project). Moreover, we expect that the swarm of robots will dance according to musical melodies played by human.
- The second group will work with a heterogeneous group of robots for a project: "A swam of Kangaroo robots". The project is about a marsupial robot (Kangaroo mother) loading and unloading their offspring giving advantages of fast deployment and withdraw for searching and rescue in hazard environment. The mothership will carry small robots and deploy them in an narrow area that the mother is not accessible. In this project, two research subjects of multi-query and cooperative control for loading and unloading offspring are emphasized.
Congratulations to Simon Bjerg Mikkelsen who successfully defended his Master thesis in swarm formation. He graduated with a very good mark. This result is as acknowledgment to his research contribution to swarm formation. During the thesis, he published two conference papers. This is exceptionally good result for a Master degree. Once, congratulations to Simon and wish him a bright future!
We have succeeded in developing a new method of potential field for robot formation, called Probabilistic Potential Field (PPF). The approach is targeted on distributed control of robot swarm because the potential field is individually established by each robot. There are 3 major novelties of this approach different from previously developed methods: 1) The attractive and repulsive forces have been developed based on communication only, not including perception. 2) The potential field is a probabilitic function, not pre-assumed based on diffirential equations . 3) The probabilistic function has been developed based on empirical measure of the robots' communication
We sucessfully demonstrated that, a swarm of mobile robots can form and maintain hexagonal and square lattice. Impressingly, we can achieve the formation transition from square to hexagonal lattices without predetermination. The alternative is only obtained if the diagonal robots are fixed with their position in the formation.
This result is documented in an scientific paper and we hope to publish it very soon!
A realtime performance of hexagonal formation:
Square formation maintainance:
and
The formation transition from square to hexagon:
Browser our youtube for more video clips http://www.youtube.com/user/TheMoreThanOne
We have done some experiments to test algorithms of swarm aggregation. Basically, we would like to see how our robots can maintain their connectivities when we use probablistic directional communication as the attractive forces. We also manupulated the environment to observe how robots can search their swarm and how the swarm can gather their lost members.
The results are quite opministic!
The first experiment presents how three small scatted groups will cluster into united swarm.
The second experiment confirmed the robustness of swarm aggregation
The third experiment presents how robots can search their swarm and how they swarm can gather their lost members. To do that, we manipulated the environment during the experiment
The lab participated in an EU proprosal in FP7-AGRI named "ICT-WAT: Information and Communicaton Technologies in Sustainable Water Resources Management in Argiculture". The project proposal is about using wireless sensor network to optimize the usage of the water on the field. The partners are: 1. Agricultural Universtiy of Athens (AUA), Greece: Coordinator 2. Agricultural Research Council Research Unit (CRA-SCA), Italy. 3. Aalborg University, Denmark 4. EPSILON Italia SRL, Italy.
The total budget is about 300.000 Euro in which AAU will take 120.000 Euro
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