Dr. Felix Schill gives talk at ASL: Scalable underwater communication for large scale swarms and Haptic feedback for hovering vehicle control
Dr. Felix Schill from ANU will present his work on underwater communication, and haptic feedback for hovering vehicle control. It will be on Thursday 10th after the group meeting. Please find below an abstract of the work and a bio of Dr. Schill.
Title:
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 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.