Now that the spring semester is over, we are quickly transitioning to summer research mode. This week, we have welcomed four students:
They are working on lab infrastructure, integrating our motion capture system and a fleet mobile robots using ROS. More updates as the summer, and the work, progresses!
The below two videos show, respectively, the physical state and the full state space of a motivation dynamics agent. The agent is motivated to visit each of the two goal states (red diamonds) while staying in the workspace (the black circle) and avoiding the obstacles (black discs with red circles at their centers).
The motivation dynamics are as described in our SIADS paper. As guaranteed by the analysis in the paper, the closed-loop system exhibits a stable limit cycle where the agent cyclically visits each of the goal states in turn.
Our paper “A dynamical system for prioritizing and coordinating motivations” has been accepted for publication in the SIAM Journal on Applied Dynamical Systems. The arXiv preprint has been updated accordingly.
Motivated by applications in multi-robot information gathering, we have developed a distributed multi-agent algorithm for solving graphical multi-armed bandit problems. A video of its implementation on a laboratory test bed is shown below.