In this project, I have investigated the following research questions, in the context of the Parallel Bricklayer Problem (i.e., how to coordinate the efforts of multiple independent agents contributing to building a structure to avoid deadlocks and maxmimize efficiency):
- Can we model how a large swarm of robots interacts with and manipulates its environment in a general way using graph theory? Can we derive a set of properties that graphs representing structures which can be constructed or deconstructed by swarms such that from a valid starting graph state the swarm is provably guaranteed to reach a final graph state, even though the sequence of actions to reach the final state is not specified in advance?
This project relies heavily on SIERRA for running experiments and processing results.
John Harwell
Researcher and Engineer
Experienced embedded systems engineer whose research interests include multi-agent modeling and behaviors, swarm intelligence, bio-inspired algorithms and multi-robot systems, and computational optimization.