Mason Engineering students and faculty compete at 99 Luftballoons competition

Anonymous — Fri, 08 Jan 2021 17:02:30 +0000

Mason Engineering students and faculty compete at 99 Luftballoons competition Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 01/08/2021 - 12:02

Left to right: Dinesh Karri, Robert Hooks, and Joseph Matthew Prince getting ready to compete at the Luftballoons competition at Indiana University.

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a Lighter-Than-Air (LTA) robotic shark blimp, which is what a team of George Mason University students and faculty used to participate in the 99++ Luftballoons Competition at Indiana University on November 9 through 13.

The competition took place at the Indiana University Bloomington campus where people from Mason, the University of California Los Angeles, Indiana University at Bloomington, Pennsylvania State University, the Office of Naval Research, the Naval Surface Warfare Center – Crane Division, and the Army Research Laboratory competed in an aerial soccer match using remote-controlled LTA robots.

“LTA robots don’t need any support to hold them in the air. Helicopters need propellers, but all LTA robots can stay in the air on their own. Instead, they need controls to move them about in the air,” says Mason graduate student and competition teammate Joseph Prince Mathew.

Each team had defenders and seekers to protect their goal and score points against the other team. “It got pretty competitive,” says Dinesh Karri, another team member. “But it was so much fun.”

Every team played each other, and the teams with the most points faced off at the end of the five-day event. “Unfortunately, we lost, but we had the most points overall throughout the week,” says Mathew.

Mathew and Karri were working with Assistant Professor Feitian Zhang to develop an underwater glider as part of their PhD studies when they found out about the opportunity to bring their skills to the air. “It was a change of medium, from underwater to air. The dynamics are pretty similar,” says Mathew.

Robert Hooks, a junior undergraduate electrical engineering major, jumped on the project because of his interest in robotics and autonomous systems. “When I heard about it from one of my professors, I was very intrigued. It was a valuable and fun experience to learn hands-on,” says Hooks.

Topics

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

swarm robotics

Robots

aeronautics

In This Story

Cameron Nowzari

Professor researches swarm-robotics field

Nanci Hellmich — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 15:47:16 +0000

Professor researches swarm-robotics field Nanci Hellmich Wed, 10/16/2019 - 11:47

“Robots are cool, but what is even more awesome is the math behind the robots. Robots are very good at following instructions, but the caveat is they only understand math.”

— Cameron Nowzari, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Cameron Nowzari served as the faculty advisor for several senior design teams doing swarm-robotics projects.

When Mason Engineering professor Cameron Nowzari was an undergraduate, all he wanted to do was design and build robots.

He was especially interested in the idea of swarm robotics, in which large teams of robots are designed to cooperatively complete tasks that a single device might not be able to do alone.

“At first, I was mostly interested in physically building the robots and getting them to work,” says Nowzari, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “But after countless frustrating nights spent alone tinkering with robots that didn’t work nine times out of 10, I discovered the beauty of mathematical control theory.”

Nowzari has been the faculty advisor for several senior design teams doing swarm-robotics projects, in which students learn that building a group of robots to perform specific tasks requires setting up and solving the correct math problems, he says.

“Robots are cool, but what is even more awesome is the math behind the robots. Robots are very good at following instructions, but the caveat is they only understand math.”

Nowzari’s research is focused on the design of efficient, distributed coordination strategies for complex network systems. “My work has applications in mobile sensors, autonomous robots, allocation of distributed resources, public health and epidemiology, network protection/security, marketing, and the internet of things.”

And as part of his research, Nowzari is working on deploying a swarm of 100-plus robotic blimps that can cooperatively complete tasks that would be difficult or impossible for a single agent. He recently received a grant from the U.S. Navy for his project, “Enabling Emergent Behaviors in Unmanned Robotic Swarm Systems.”

“Coordinating large numbers of autonomous agents to act as a cohesive swarm is challenging because each autonomous agent has a different view of the world,” he says. “There is no centralized computer or brain telling each agent what to do. Each individual robot must figure out for themselves exactly how they can contribute to the goal of the overall swarm.”

His research group develops and solves general classes of math problems that can be applied to many real-world issues.

“The robots are a sexy application that bring control theory to life,” he says. “The main challenge is figuring out precisely what math problems need to be solved to get the robots to act in the intended way.”

This story appeared in the fall issue of ECE News.

“Coordinating large numbers of autonomous agents to act as a cohesive swarm is challenging because each autonomous agent has a different view of the world."

— Cameron Nowzari, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.