Dr. Rafael Fierro, professor at the University of New Mexico, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Albuquerque, USA, held a very interesting lecture on synchronization strategies for robotic networks. As Prof. Fierro said, robotic networks are particularly well suited to execute tasks that cover wide geographic ranges, require significant parallelization, and/or depend on capabilities that are varied in both quantity and difficulty.
Example applications include littoral exploration and surveillance, rainforest health monitoring, autonomous transportation systems, warehouse automation, and hazardous waste clean-up. This talk focused on synchronization strategies to control robotic networks. First some of the projects at the MARHES Lab were outlined including work on agile transportation of suspended loads using aerial robots and coordination of heterogeneous robotic networks. Then a multi-vehicle test bed and its applications were presented. Also, recent work on two problems was described:(1) detecting changes in the topology of a robotic network through synchronization of nonlinear oscillators, and (2) coordinating a team of nonholonomic sensors using a binary consensus protocol.