Investigation into communication and control networks for cellular robotics applications

This project will build upon existing modular robot system designs, focusing on the integration of autonomic behaviours into modular systems, as a part of a larger programme of research into probabilistic and knowledge-based reasoning for self-aware self-configuring autonomous systems. The aim of the project is to give a decentralised system of robotic modules being developed in the laboratory fully knowledge-based reasoning and communication capabilities. Modules will be able to communicate with each other in any possible physical configuration. Knowledge is shared as semantic base concepts and conjunctions of base concepts to enable the whole system to learn from its elements in the context of their tasks and to produce emergent and adaptive system behaviours based on semantic reasoning methods.

A system of software nodes running on modular hardware elements is to be developed, and an adaptive ontology of base classes relevant to modular robotics created that will serve as the protocol for communications between modules. Data will be gathered on the performance of different networking, reasoning, knowledge sharing and goal-based task completions, and this will be used to further improve the knowledge within the system to be used for future task completion. There are no modular robotic systems implementing a formalised semantic knowledge gathering and sharing system that can be reasoned upon and very few projects worldwide implementing true knowledge-based reasoning for robotics. This PhD will lay the groundwork for highly novel knowledge-based distributed systems with applications in robotics and autonomous systems. The ultimate goals of this research programme are to construct "cellular" robotic entities based on reasoning and estimation, and to achieve a form of "common sense" by using reasoning to convert basic robotic awareness data into complex conclusions regarding the robot's own state and its environment.

The creation of such a system for autonomously sharing knowledge and reasoning on it within a self-configuring robot would put the United Kingdom at the forefront of this largely unexplored area of modular robotics research. Such a knowledge-based modular system is intrinsically adaptable and has a wide variety of applications in harsh/unpredictable environment operations such as long term space or deep sea exploration missions. This project will align closely with EPSRC Objective 1: "Delivering economic impact and ensuring social prosperity". A modular autonomous system such as that being researched in this project will enhance future digital technologies by providing a platform for developers to create high-level directives for a colony of processors or autonomous agents without them requiring detailed knowledge of the low-level system functions or environment for operation. The project will also align closely with Objective 3: "Enabling the UK engineering and physical sciences landscape to deliver" in that it will deliver an open and state-of-the-art research software platform and hardware demonstrator that will benefit future collaborative projects in Robotics and Autonomous Systems. This will allow researchers in fields such as computer science, software engineering, astronomy, marine biology and others to develop software and hardware solutions for modular, self-configuring robotics using knowledge-based autonomy methods and rapidly test research hypotheses in a real-world environment.

There are currently no companies or collaborators involved with this project, but upcoming research proposals will build on this work to further develop the concept of knowledge-based modular autonomy and reach out to additional applications and research groups.