PhD Dissertation Defense - Baskin B. Senbaslar

PhD Dissertation Defense - Baskin B. Senbaslar

Committee Members: Gaurav S. Sukhatme (Chair), Sven Koenig, Satish Kumar Thittamaranahalli, Mihailo R. Jovanovic

Title: Decentralized Real Time Trajectory Planning For Multi Robot Navigation in Cluttered Environments

Abstract: Multi robot collision free and deadlock free navigation in cluttered environments with static and dynamic obstacles is a fundamental problem for many real world applications. Dynamic obstacles can additionally be interactive, i.e., changing their behaviors depending on the behaviors of other objects. We focus on decision making algorithms, with a particular emphasis on decentralized real time trajectory planning, to enable multi robot navigation in such environments.
Practicality of the developed approaches is a central focus of ours, such that we design our systems and algorithms under assumptions that can be realized in the real world. Central concerns of our treatment are embracing on board compute, memory, and storage limitations of robotic systems, not relying on communication for safe operation, and explicitly account for communication imperfections, allowing navigation with imperfect a priori knowledge, embracing controller trajectory tracking errors and accounting for them, working with minimal sensing and estimation capabilities, and achieving highly reactive collision avoidance behavior.

We introduce i. two decentralized real time multi robot trajectory planning algorithms to allow static obstacle, interactive dynamic obstacle, and teammate avoidance, ii. a constraint generation, overconstraining, and constraint discarding scheme to ensure inter robot collision avoidance under asynchronous planning that is inherent in decentralized systems, which we use within one of the proposed planners, and iii. a multi robot aware planning and control stack that allows collision free and deadlock free navigation in diverse types of environments, which combines three qualitatively different decision making approaches in a hierarchical manner.

Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 406

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Melissa Ochoa

Event Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/94985203072?pwd=Y3h6OTJIY244RU1LYlhlR0JFa3dMZz09