As robotic systems become increasingly prevalent in our lives (e.g., by harvesting food, assisting with disaster response and defense, and transporting persons and our goods around the world) there is a growing need to ensure that they can cooperate to achieve their intended goals. Robotic cooperation in the real-world is...
Emerging applications for robotic data collection include ocean monitoring, emergency response and urban search and rescue. At the core of these applications is a robot's ability to make informed decisions on incomplete data. This dissertation addresses this problem by developing novel techniques for modeling and estimating structured environments using deep...
While robotic systems may have once been relegated to structured environments and automation style tasks, in recent years these boundaries have begun to erode. As robots begin to operate in largely unstructured environments, it becomes more difficult for them to effectively interpret their surroundings. As sensor technology improves, the amount...
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...
Tensegrity structures are composed of pure compressional elements that are connected via a network of pure tensional elements. The concept of tensegrity promises numerous advantages to the field of robotics. Tensegrity robots are, however, notoriously difficult to control due to their oscillatory nature and nonlinear interaction between the components. Multiagent...
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...
There is growing commercial interest in the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in urban environments, specifically for package delivery applications. However, the size, complexity and sheer numbers of expected UAVs makes conventional air traffic management that relies on human air traffic controllers infeasible. To enable UAVs to safely and...
In this dissertation, new theory and its applications are developed to predict three properties of complex ecological communities: stability, equilibrium response, and non-equilibrium dynamics. First, a graph-theoretic analysis identifies the interconnections in a complex ecosystem that promote or diminish stability (Chapter 2). The hierarchy of interactions that influences stability and...
Imbalanced deoxyribonucleoside triphosphate (dNTP) pools are mutagenic for DNA synthesis in both intact cells and cell-free replication systems. Almost certainly, such mutagenesis involves competition between correctly and incorrectly base-paired precursors at replication sites. However, there are certain differences between the intact cell and cell-free systems that do not always allow...