Hardware Podcasts

Episode 97: Robot swarms for environmental monitoring - Pratap Tokekar

Robot Talk · 8 Nov 2024 · 31m · Episode 97

What this episode covers

Pratap Tokekar, an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland, explains how heterogeneous multi-robot teams—combining aerial drones and water-based robotic boats—collaborate to monitor environmental hazards like chemical leaks and wildfires. He details the use of consensus algorithms for swarm coordination and risk-aware planning to handle real-world hardware discrepancies, such as speed variations, that break simulation-based models. Tokekar also discusses applications in precision agriculture, where drones and ground robots collect data for high-throughput phenotyping and yield estimation, highlighting the gap between theoretical algorithms and field deployment.

Most relevant to

early-stage companies

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
University of Maryland, University of Pennsylvania, Virginia Tech, College of Engineering Pune, University of Minnesota
Also
GRASP lab

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