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Murray, Richard M.

Publications and source records attributed to Murray, Richard M..

Planning and Optimization for Multi-robot Planetary Cave Exploration under Intermittent Connectivity Constraints

Exploring subsurface structures with autonomous robots is of growing interest in the context of planetary caves studies. Communication between robots in these environments is severely degraded which complicates coordination and information distribution. In this paper we focus on planning for mobility and communication in a cave exploration scenario where the situational awareness of a static base station is critical. We propose a notion of information-consistency where a plan itself is part of the information to be shared between robots, and propose a method for generating information-consistent plans. We discuss in detail how the resulting plan can be robustly implemented with minimal communication through local mission executives that run on individual robots. We describe preliminary results on the performance of the planning algorithm and integration of the local mission executives in a high-fidelity simulation environment.

Murray, Richard M.↗

Control experiments in planar manipulation and grasping

Many algorithms have been proposed in the literature for control of multifingered robot hands. Here, the performance of several of these algorithms is compared, along with that of some extensions of more conventional manipulator control laws, in the case of planar grasping. Based on experiments performed on Styx, the most effective control laws are the simple joint control law and the generalized computed torque law. The computed torque control law is shown to be an attractive alternative for position control of multifingered hands.

Murray, Richard M.↗