Date of Award:

12-2008

Document Type:

Thesis

Degree Name:

Master of Science (MS)

Department:

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Committee Chair(s)

YangQuan Chen

Committee

YangQuan Chen

Committee

Wei Ren

Committee

Reyhan Baktur

Abstract

This thesis introduces a design combining an emerging area in robotics with a well established mathematical research topic: swarm intelligence and Voronoi tessellations, respectively. The main objective for this research is to design an economical and robust swarm system to achieve distributed control. This research combines swarm intelligence with Voronoi tessellations to localize a source and create formations. Extensive software coding must be implemented for this design, such as the development of a discrete centroidal Voronoi tessellation (CVT) algorithm.

The ultimate purpose of this research is to advance the existing Mobile Actuator and Sensor Network (MASnet) platform to eventually develop a cooperative robot team that can sense, predict, and finally neutralize a diffusion process. Previous work on the MASnet platform has served as a foundation for this research. While growing closer to the MASnet goal, results also provide stimulating discoveries for mathematical and swarm research areas.

Checksum

a463ba12824803e7a37e678e9a03a5d5

Included in

Robotics Commons

Share

COinS