Spring Berman
In natural systems, emergent structures often arise to balance competing demands. Army ants, for example, form temporary "walls" that prevent interference between foraging trails. Inspired by this behavior, we developed two decentralized…
Connected and automated vehicles and robot swarms hold transformative potential for enhancing safety, efficiency, and sustainability in the transportation and manufacturing sectors. Extensive testing and validation of these technologies is…
In this article, we consider the problem of stabilizing stochastic processes, which are constrained to a bounded Euclidean domain or a compact smooth manifold, to a given target probability density. Most existing works on modeling and…
The study of non-line-of-sight (NLOS) imaging is growing due to its many potential applications, including rescue operations and pedestrian detection by self-driving cars. However, implementing NLOS imaging on a moving camera remains an…
Robust feature matching forms the backbone for most Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (vSLAM), visual odometry, 3D reconstruction, and Structure from Motion (SfM) algorithms. However, recovering feature matches from texture-poor…
In this paper, we propose a computationally efficient, robust density control strategy for the mean-field model of a robotic swarm. We formulate a static optimal control problem (OCP) that computes a robot velocity field which drives the…
The problem of adapting models from a source domain using data from any target domain of interest has gained prominence, thanks to the brittle generalization in deep neural networks. While several test-time adaptation techniques have…
CHARTOPOLIS is a multi-faceted sociotechnical testbed meant to aid in building connections among engineers, psychologists, anthropologists, ethicists, and artists. Superficially, it is an urban autonomous-vehicle testbed that includes both…
Controlling soft continuum robotic arms is challenging due to their hyper-redundancy and dexterity. In this paper we demonstrate, for the first time, closed-loop control of the configuration space variables of a soft robotic arm, composed…
In this paper, we present a decentralized control approach based on a Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) method that employs barrier certificates for safe navigation of multiple nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots in unknown…
We consider a scenario in which a group of quadrotors is tasked at tracking multiple stationary targets in an unknown, bounded environment. The quadrotors search for targets along a spatial grid overlaid on the environment while performing…
In this paper, we propose a probabilistic consensus-based multi-robot search strategy that is robust to communication link failures, and thus is suitable for disaster affected areas. The robots, capable of only local communication, explore…
In this paper, we present a consensus-based decentralized multi-robot approach to reconstruct a discrete distribution of features, modeled as an occupancy grid map, that represent information contained in a bounded planar 2D environment,…
In this paper, we consider the problem of optimally guiding a large-scale swarm of underwater vehicles that is tasked with the indirect control of an advection-diffusion environmental field. The microscopic vehicle dynamics are governed by…
In this paper, we investigate how the self-synchronization property of a swarm of Kuramoto oscillators can be controlled and exploited to achieve target densities and target phase coherence. In the limit of an infinite number of…
In this work, we present preliminary work on a novel method for Human-Swarm Interaction (HSI) that can be used to change the macroscopic behavior of a swarm of robots with decentralized sensing and control. By integrating a small yet…
In this paper, we present a reinforcement learning approach to designing a control policy for a "leader" agent that herds a swarm of "follower" agents, via repulsive interactions, as quickly as possible to a target probability distribution…
In this work, we present a novel distributed method for constructing an occupancy grid map of an unknown environment using a swarm of robots with global localization capabilities and limited inter-robot communication. The robots explore the…
In this work, we present a novel automated procedure for constructing a metric map of an unknown domain with obstacles using uncertain position data collected by a swarm of resource-constrained robots. The robots obtain this data during…
In this paper, we investigate the exact controllability properties of an advection-diffusion equation on a bounded domain, using time- and space-dependent velocity fields as the control parameters. This partial differential equation (PDE)…