distributed robotics at bard
Just as special purpose mainframes grew into general purpose personal
computers, special purpose industrial robots are evolving into more
general purpose personal robots. Although planetary rovers and car
assembling robot arms come immediately to mind, traditional software
systems are becoming increasingly embodied and situated in their
environment — they are becoming robots. Similarly, robot
computing systems, like traditional computing systems, can be built in
a distributed manner — like the Internet — allowing us to
exploit spatial locality, parallelism, redundancy, heterogeneity, and
modularity.
Research in the draB Lab is at the boundary between the real, physical world and the computational world; at the intersection of intelligent systems, robotics, and software systems research. By building and experimenting with interactive robot systems we hope to understand the fundamental trade-offs concerning computation, communication, sensing, mobility, and manipulation in robot systems. Moreover, we look to use the potential of distributed robotics, and computation in general, to make the real, physical world a better place. We work on problems involving educational robotics, energy-aware robot software systems, robot teams, and sensor networks.