Important notes:

• The final exam will be from 10:15 - 11:30 on Tuesday, May 6th. It will be closed book, closed notes.

Material covered:

• All material covered in class Tuesday, March 11th through Thursday, April 24th, will be on the exam. The Final Exam will also assume a working knowledge of all material covered in class.
• Readings 18 - 31 will be covered on the exam. BE SURE TO READ ALL THIS MATERIAL

Study Questions

Use the following questions as a guide for studying for the Final Exam. There is no guarantee that these questions will be the ones asked on the exam, but they are a good indicator of the type of questions to expect.

• Taxonomies:
• List the taxonomic categories defined by Dudek for each of the following multi-robot team characteristics:
  • Size of the collective
  • Communication range
  • Communication topology
  • Communication bandwidth
  • Collective reconfigurability
  • Processing ability of each unit
  • Team composition

• For particular application solutions (which will be provided), define their characteristics according to the Dudek taxonomy.
• List the taxonomic categories defined by Balch for each of the following multi-robot task characteristics:
  • Time
  • Subject of action
  • Resource limits
  • Group movement
  • Platform capabilities

• For particular multi-robot tasks (which will be provided), define their characteristics according to the Balch taxonomy.
• Task Allocation:
• Describe the characteristics of problems that are well-suited for distributed task allocation solutions.
• In the context of the Contract Net Protocol:
  • Describe the roles of the Manager and Contractor.
  • What is a Common Internode Language?
  • What is a Directed Award?
  • What are the reasons why a Manager might not receive any bids to a task announcement?
  • What is an Immediate Response bid?
  • What are the possible replies to an Immediate Response bid?
  • Under what network loading conditions is the use of task announcements always warranted? Why?
  • Under what network loading conditions are node available messages preferred? Why?
  • Are simultaneous task assignments within a team possible? Explain how or why not.

• In the context of ALLIANCE:
  • What is the purpose of the impatience parameters?
  • What is the purpose of the acquiescence parameters?
  • Assuming there is 1 task to be accomplished, how should impatience parameters be set (relative to each other) across robot team members to ensure that the "best" robot is the one that performs the task?
  • How is communication used in the ALLIANCE approach?
  • Describe an ALLIANCE solution to the task/goal assignment problem you implemented in Assignment #6. That is, describe an alternative solution to Assignment #6 using ALLIANCE rather than a negotiation protocol.
  • Are simultaneous task assignments within a team possible? Explain how or why not.
• Highly Heterogeneous Teams:
• What are the advantages and disadvantages of highly heterogeneous robot teams, relative to homogeneous robot teams?

• In the context of marsupial robot teams:
  • What are the advantages that the "daughter" robots receive from the "mother" robot?
  • Name and describe 3 types of heterogeneity.
  • Name and describe 4 types of cognitive heterogeneity.
  • Name and describe 4 types of behavioral heterogeneity.
  • For a given task, identify the type of heterogeneity (from the types above) present in a particular task solution.

• In the context of aerial-ground vehicle teams:
  • What robot control issues are unique to this context?
  • Describe an application that is well-suited for aerial-ground vehicle teams.

• For a given list of applications, describe a suitable robot team composition for each that provides the best required capabilities.
• Cooperative Localization, Mapping, and Exploration:
• In what ways is the cooperative localization and mapping problem made easier because of using multiple robots?

• In what ways is the cooperative localization and mapping problem made harder because of using multiple robots?

• What issues arise if using a heterogeneous robot team for cooperative localization, mapping, and exploration?
• Embedded Systems:
• Describe the use of embedded systems in automotive telematics.

• Describe the use of embedded systems in precision agriculture.

• Describe the use of embedded systems in a military defense systems.

• Describe the characteristics of embedded systems that make them distinct from more traditional networked distributed systems.

• Name some key technology trends that are enabling embedded computer systems.

• Describe the self-configuration process in embedded computer systems.

• Describe the adaptive coordination process in embedded computer systems.

• Describe what "trust" and "failure" models are in embedded computer systems, and why they are important.

• Describe the advantages and disadvantages of centralized, decentralized, and hierarchical control approaches for embedded computer systems.

• How can communication-based wave propagation be used to generate location information in a dense network of sensor "particles"?

• In MIT's Project Oxygen, describe the key technical issues that must be addressed to enable the "favorite music" selection to follow the user from room to room.
• Multi-Robot Soccer:
• Why is multi-robot soccer an interesting domain for multi-robot systems research? List the general research issues that must be addressed in this domain.

• What additional challenging research issue arises in multi-robot soccer that was not present in other multi-robot systems we studied this semester? Describe new capabilities that a multi-robot system must have in order to address this issue.

• How does the task allocation issue arise in multi-robot soccer? Develop an approach for dealing with the task allocation issue in multi-robot soccer.
• Pseudocode
• Write pseudocode to generate a specific distributed robot behavior (the specific behavior will be specified).