Jamie Roberts

In this project, I aim to aid in the realisation of robust, reconfigurable and decentralised Multi-Robot Systems. Industrial settings are good candidates to take advantage of automation systems but the current systems are rarely decentralised and as such implementation is not only expensive but also requires major infrastructure changes. In an attempt to tackle the impact of these problems, I aim to work towards more capable decentralised systems so that ideally, they can be introduced to a current industrial settings and not so that industrial settings need to be drastically altered to meet their requirements. I aim to approach this problem by focusing on the Task Decomposition of Multi-Robot System problems by treating them as statistical thermodynamic problems, ideally achieving a Multi-Robot Control strategy that works to maintain a homeostasis of its environment, such as a logistics warehouse. I intend to utilise the Hoverbot System as an embodied simulation platform which provides a proof of concept for these ideas. This is so that the final product is not only a computational simulation but a solution which also incorporates the real world trappings of robots doing work in their environment, relative to their scale, and overcoming communication issues due to the multi modal nature of their environments.