Centibots
My research at the University of Washington centered around probabilistic methods for Mobile Robotics. From July of 2002 to January 2004 I worked on the DARPA funded project Centibots. The University of Washington and SRI International collaborated on the project. The goal was to have 100 robots autonomously explore and map a large indoor environment as well as perform surveillance and people tracking tasks in a distributed fashion. The system was highly multi-threaded and written in C++. The robotics research group at UW worked on coordinating teams of robots to explore and map indoor environments under the assumption of limited wireless communication. During the course of exploration, the robots must determine their relative locations in order to combine maps and explore in a coordinated fashion. My work involved developing probabilistic techniques for a robot to determine the locations of the other robots in the system using a partial map of the environment and a stochastic model of the environment's structure. Please see the publications section for papers and abstracts published as part of this work. Linked below is a movie showing multi-robot exploration.
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