Ants Don't Have WiFi: Enabling Robotic Agents to Collaborate and Compete without a Communication Network

In the animal world there is no WiFi - agents collaborate and compete by sensing and predicting the actions of teammates, rivals, predators, and prey.  Likewise, in the engineered world, many of the most promising applications for autonomous robots require them to interact with other agents in the world by sensing and predicting their actions.  Autonomous driving in traffic, collision avoidance for UAVs, and human-robot teaming are key examples where a wireless network either cannot exist, or will not exist for some time.  In competitive scenarios, such as racing or pursuit-evasion, agents would not want to communicate even if they could.  In this talk I will describe several recent examples from my lab of algorithms enabling multiple robotic agents to interact, both collaboratively and competitively, without a communication network.  I will discuss a communication-free multi-robot manipulation algorithm by which many simple robots cooperate to transport a payload too large for any one of them to move alone.  I will describe a highly scalable collision avoidance strategy, and a related pursuit-evasion strategy, that only requires agents to sense the positions of nearby neighbors.  Finally, I will present a game theoretic receding horizon control algorithm for autonomous drone racing, in which drones sense each other's position with a monocular camera.  I will show results from hardware experiments with ground robots, scale autonomous cars, and quadrotor UAVs collaborating and competing in the scenarios above.

Speaker: Mac Schwager, Stanford