This thesis presents a decentralized communication planning algorithm for cooperative terrain-based navigation (dec-TBN) with autonomous underwater vehicles. The proposed algorithm uses forward simulation to approximate the value of communicating at each time step. The simulations are used to build a directed acyclic graph that can be searched to provide a...
Multi-robot systems are versatile and extremely capable of exploration tasks in complex environments. Increasingly sophisticated planners, which incorporate new features of a multi-robot system, are necessary for the operation of the systems. Marsupial robots are multi-robot systems consisting of a carrier robot (e.g., a ground vehicle), which is highly capable...
Human-robot teams are invaluable for mapping unknown environments, exploring difficult-to-reach areas, and manipulating inaccessible equipment. However, guiding autonomous robots requires dealing with these dynamic domains while synthesizing a significant amount of data and balancing competing objectives. Current mission planning methods often involve manually specifying low-level parameters of the mission, such...
Deep learning has recently revolutionized robot perception in many canonical robotic applications, such as autonomous driving. However, a similar transformation has yet to occur in more harsh environments including underwater and underground. This is due in part to the difficulty in deploying robots in these environments, which lack large real...
Information gathering tasks, such as terrestrial search and rescue, aerial inspection, and marine monitoring, require robotic unmanned systems to make decisions on how to travel within an environment to maximize or minimize a path-dependent information objective function. The distribution of information throughout the environment is the result of various processes,...
Motion planning is a cornerstone of autonomous robots, enabling robots to safely and efficiently perform tasks such as package delivery, infrastructure inspection, and manipulation. However, as the field of robotics matures, robotic systems are being developed that (1) are challenging to analytically model, (2) require computationally expensive model-based controllers, and...
We present a method for decentralized, multi-robot exploration in adverse environments where communication is minimal. A key conceptual feature of our method is enabling implicit coordination between robots by training a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) as a heuristic for planning using Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). Our method consists of...
This thesis analyzes the ways in which the practices of yoga, mindfulness and meditation can be of benefit to hospice and palliative care practitioners in addressing job-related stress. The research suggests that these contemplative practices can be effective in addressing compassion fatigue among hospice and palliative care professionals. The thesis...
This thesis argues for the importance of justice of recognition not only for humans, but the entire non-human world in the face of environmental destruction and climate crisis. The common response to the degradation of the world’s ecological sphere is to act with technological, scientific, and material based responses. However,...
A wide variety of hydrodynamic theories are utilized to approximate a Wave Energy Converter’s (WEC) equation of motion. Numerous theories have been refined in order to improve numerical approximations of WEC dynamics. When incorporating refined hydrodynamic theories into numerical models, there are distinct impacts on WEC rigid body motions, cable...