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Michael Whitzer

Possible papers associated with this exact author name in Arrow. This page groups case-insensitive exact name matches and is not a full identity disambiguation profile.

3 papers

1 author row

ICRA Conference 2020 Conference Paper

DC-CAPT: Concurrent Assignment and Planning of Trajectories for Dubins Cars

Michael Whitzer
Daigo Shishika
Dinesh Thakur
Vijay Kumar 0001
Amanda Prorok

We present an algorithm for the concurrent assignment and planning of collision-free trajectories (DC-CAPT) for robots whose kinematics can be modeled as Dubins cars, i. e. , robots constrained in terms of their initial orientation and their minimum turning radius. Coupling the assignment and trajectory planning subproblems allows for a computationally tractable solution. This solution is guaranteed to be collision- free through the use of a single constraint: the start and goal locations have separation distance greater than some threshold. We derive this separation distance by extending a prior work that assumed holonomic robots. We demonstrate the validity of our approach, and show its efficacy through simulations and experiments where groups of robots executing Dubins curves travel to their assigned goal locations without collisions.

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IROS Conference 2017 Conference Paper

A decentralized algorithm for assembling structures with modular robots

David Saldaña
Bruno Gabrich
Michael Whitzer
Amanda Prorok
Mario F. M. Campos
Mark Yim
Vijay Kumar 0001

Recent work in the field of bio-inspired robotic systems has introduced designs for modular robots that are able to assemble into structures (e. g. , bridges, landing platforms, fences) using their bodies as the building components. Yet, it remains an open question as to how to program large swarms of robotic modules so that the assembly task is performed as efficiently as possible. Moreover, the problem of designing assembly algorithms is compounded by the scale of these systems, and by the lack of centralized guidance in unstructured environments. The main contribution of this work is a decentralized algorithm to assemble structures with modular robots. Importantly, we coordinate the robots so that docking actions can be parallelized. We show the correctness of our algorithm, and we demonstrate its scalability and generality through multiple scenarios in simulation. Experiments on physical robots demonstrate the validity of our approach in real-world settings.

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ICRA Conference 2015 Conference Paper

Sensor coverage robot swarms using local sensing without metric information

Rattanachai Ramaithitima
Michael Whitzer
Subhrajit Bhattacharya
Vijay Kumar 0001

We consider the problem of deploying a swarm of mobile robots into an unknown environment for attaining complete sensor coverage of the environment. The robots have limited and noisy sensing capabilities and no metric or global information available to them. Using tools from algebraic topology, we formally describe the sensor coverage as a simplicial complex, deploy robots through the complex using bearing-based local controllers, and attain coverage while identifying and removing sensor redundancies. Despite the highly limited sensing capabilities and complete lack of global localization and metric information, we demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is complete, always terminates in a finite-sized environment, is guaranteed to attain complete coverage and is robust to sensor failures. The algorithm presented in this paper was demonstrated through simulation and proves to effectively cover and explore unknown indoor environments.

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