Project explores uses for robots *** Goal is to help after emergency
By Amy Wold
Advocate staff writer
Publication: The Advocate
Source: South Louisiana
Sunday,January 15, 2012
Edition: Main, Section: B, Page 01

LSU and Georgia Tech professors are collaborating on a project to 
improve the ability of robots to test for dangerous substances in areas 
hazardous to humans. The idea, they say, is to keep people out of harm's 
way in the aftermath of emergencies such as the three-month Deepwater 
Horizon/BP oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. One of the project leaders is 
expert in engineering, the other in mathematics. Fumin Zhang, assistant 
professor in the school of electrical and computer engineering at 
Georgia Tech in Atlanta, said going into the new project, he already had 
a number of students building robots for competitions. Michael Malisoff, 
associate professor in the department of mathematics at LSU, said he 
specializes in the field of mathematics that deals with control 
processes such as those that apply to robotics. After the two met at a 
conference, they started talking about how they could combine their 
expertise. That discussion led to a National Science Foundation grant 
funding their work on better ways to control robots able to operate and 
do needed testing in areas that could be hazardous to people, such as 
around a wild well on the sea floor. Following the Deepwater Horizon 
three-month oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, people in the 
coastal areas of Georgia were worried the oil would migrate from 
offshore Louisiana, around Florida and wash up along the East Coast, 
Zhang said. Among other concerns, Georgia's coastline is a productive 
fishing area dependent on good water quality, Zhang said. "So people 
there were very worried about this oil spill," Zhang said. "Michael is a 
world expert on controller analysis for engineering models, so he and I 
decided that this would be a really great opportunity to form a 
collaboration involving Georgia Tech and LSU," Zhang said. Georgia Tech 
students, along with College of William and Mary faculty member Mark 
Patterson, also participated in the study. "The classic way is to have 
robots operated by humans, but limited visibility in the muddy Gulf of 
Mexico waters means that there needed to be a way for the robots to work 
autonomously with minimal human direction," Zhang said. "That type of 
work needs rigorous robustness analysis for engineering systems, which 
is Malisoff's specialty," Zhang said. Masiloff returned Zhang's 
compliment. "Fumin is a great collaborator because he knows a lot of 
math and robotics," Masiloff said. "We are integrating math and 
engineering in a way that can advance both. It's like a give and take." 
Zhang's students were building marine robots for several competitions, 
so the mechanical element of the research project was already ready. "We 
wanted to use these robots for real-world situations," Zhang said. Zhang 
and a few of his students visited Grand Isle in July, where they 
completed 21 days of robotics testing while making use of mathematical 
methods developed by Malisoff. Since these were student-built models and 
not as sturdy as commercially manufactured robotics, the researchers 
selected a sheltered tidal area that did not suffer from damaging wave 
action, but remained linked to the open Gulf of Mexico, Zhang said. "In 
this tidal lagoon, there are wind and tides and ... " Zhang added with a 
laugh, "other hazards like snakes and dead fish and mosquitoes." The 
Grand Isle testing involved such work as taking samples and using a 
laser to look for substances that could be related to the oil leak. But 
the leading focus was to test how well the robots performed compared 
with how numerical modeling suggested they should perform. Malisoff said 
mathematical analysis is essential to determine how much uncertainty in 
the predicted behavior of the robots can be acceptable before the 
behavior of the robot is compromised. "If the uncertainty is too large, 
then bad things can happen," he said, referring to differences between 
what the computer models say the robot should do and what the robot 
actually does in real-world operations. "We want to keep humans out of 
harm's way," Malisoff said. "But we want to ensure we have a good 
performance of the instruments." The National Science Foundation issued 
a one-year grant for initial research, but Malisoff's National Science 
Foundation support was extended for another three years to continue the 
universities' collaboration. The extended research period will be used 
to look at time delays between the moment a command is given to a robot 
and the moment the robot responds to perform the ordered task. One key 
function is to better understand the effects of tides, winds and time 
delays in the control of the robotics to adapt to these changing 
conditions, the professors said. "It gives me a lot of pride to use math 
to help," Malisoff said of the LSU-Georgia Tech research aimed at 
improving response to future oil spills.