Research Projects

Multi-Robot Systems and Swarm-Robotics are widely used in various real-life scenarios, such as warehouses, factories, minefields, agricultural foraging, search and rescue, and war-fields. However, these environments have limited sensing and computational capabilities, requiring robots to make decisions based on local interactions rather than central decision-makers. Decentralized coordination among robots is necessary for efficient operation and communication. The lack of a battery recharging facility also forces robots to operate energy efficiently to complete missions before returning to the base. Frequent message exchange is essential for consensus and maintaining advantageous formations and structures. Existing asynchronous-transmission-based strategies face limitations, limiting the application areas of mobile multi-robot systems. This work aims to exploit recent advancements in synchronous-transmission (ST) to address these issues. However, ST faces challenges such as microsecond level time synchronization, hardware heterogeneity, and portability. The proposed work aims to develop a framework for generic robotic systems to take advantage of ST in a systematic way and develop a real-multi-robot system to demonstrate its effectiveness. The first set of works will involve studying the interaction between ST and the control system, developing a framework for easy interaction, and creating a software-based emulation setting for testing and experimentation with ST-based strategies. The second set of works will involve a testbed for systematically experimenting with tiny bots with ST, developing a specific language for robot coordination, and designing an efficient multi-robot task allocation strategy.