Jonathan Brookshire
 

The Trestle project focused on studying sliding autonomy with teams of multiple, heterogeneous robots performing a coordinated assembly task. Two mobile robots and one fixed Inverted Stewart Platform were tasked to construct a complex 16-square-foot truss structure that no single robot, or type of robot, could complete alone. Even with a group of multiple heterogeneous robots, each adding its unique set of capabilities to the system, the number of contingencies to be addressed for a completely autonomous system was prohibitively large. As a result, we investigated the effects of adding sliding autonomy, allowing the human operator to interact with the system in meaningful, optimized ways without completely consuming their time. The work included implementing multi-robot behaviors, developing visual servoing control loops, designing real-time inverse and forward kinematics, and performing the studies related to sliding autonomy.