OpenCourseWare: Multi-robot systems

Course planning:

Multirobot Systems is an optional subject of 3 ECTS credits. Students are expected to spend 75 hours to successfully pass the course, including aprox. 30 "in-class" like activities (lecture, problem solving and cases, lab sessions, practical work or practical research), plus aprox. 45 additional hours of "autonomous work".

Suggested global schedule:

- For a semester with around 15 weeks of classes
- A single two-hour class session is scheduled each week. The content of each session will be devoted to "in-class" activities (lecture, problem solving and cases, lab sessions, practical work or practical research).
- Each week, students are expected to employ additionally three hours of "autonomous work" to advance in their exercises.

Syllabus:

• [Week W1] Presentation and Introduction
• [Weeks W2 to W5] Robot swarms
  
• Introduction to swarm robotics
• Flocking
• Mobile sensor networks
• [Weeks W6 to W9] The consensus problem and applications
• Framework
• Distributed consensus (synchronous, asynchronous, gossip).
• Dynamic consensus and applications
• [Weeks W10 to W13] Multi-robot applications
• Distributed formation stabilization
• Persistent coverage
• Dynamic obstacle avoidance
• [Weeks W14 and W15] Advanced concepts of multi-robot systems
  

Schedule:

• In order to properly advance in the course, approx. one week after the end of each part, students should have finished the work in progress associated to this part: Brief report (about 1500 words) and code of the exercises and lab assignments, mandatory parts
  
• [Week W6] Robot swarms
  
• [Week W10] Multi robot consensus
  
• [Week W14] Multi-robot applications
  
• During weeks W14 and W15, students are expected to develop and complete the optional parts of the exercises and lab assignments, and to compile all the course results into the final documentation: final report compiling all the exercises and lab assignments (about 5000 words), the code, and a video (up to 10’) with their presentation.