ONE LAB , MANY ROBOTS
Erik Komendera Assistant Professor
Members of Field and Space Experimental Robotics ( FASER ) Lab have made progress in several areas as the lab prepares for advanced hardware trials on the Assemblers project , a collaboration with NASA Langley Research Center which seeks to develop methods for robots to autonomously assemble structures on the surface of the Moon .
Graduate student Joshua Moser has begun developing and studying the applications of mixed integer programming and reinforcement learning for stochastic multi-robot parallel task allocation with the potential for restarts and failure recovery .
Graduate student Matthew Anderson has developed a method by which robots can use sensory input ( upper right image ) to assess the status and health of a structure being assembled which uses an ensemble of supervised learning methods to estimate types and locations of structural faults with high accuracy .
Undergraduate student William Chapin has developed and refined a methodology for rapidly determining optimal poses over a variety of metrics for the lab ’ s truss-like Assembler robots ( composed of serialized Stewart platforms ), which has applications to other reconfigurable structures , and has also developed a simulation framework for sequence planning , motion planning , and kinematics and dynamics analysis .
Together , FASER Lab has worked on completing and upgrading several robots to perform trials for the Assemblers project and related projects , including the Assembler robot ( left ), the Mobile Autonomous Robotic Collaborator ( MARC ) mobile robots and their modular end-effector interfaces ( clockwise upper left to lower right ), and the 4.25 meter tall , 7.5 meter long Lightweight Surface Manipulation System ( LSMS ), in anticipation of performing collaborative robotic assembly trials during the 2020-2021 academic year .
FASER Lab robots
32 RESEARCH • VIRGINIA TECH MECHANICAL ENGINEERING ANNUAL REPORT • 2019-2020