Technological progress in robot sensing, design, and fabrication, and the availability of open source software frameworks such as the Robot Operating System (ROS), are advancing the applications of swarm robotics from toy problems to real-world tasks such as surveillance, precision agriculture, search-and-rescue, and infrastructure inspection. These applications will require the development of robot controllers and system architectures that scale well with the number of robots and that are robust to robot errors and failures. To achieve this, one approach is to design decentralized robot control policies that require only local sensing and local, ad-hoc communication. In particular, stochastic control policies can be designed that are agnostic to individual robot identities and do not require a priori information about the environment or sophisticated computation, sensing, navigation, or communication capabilities. This dissertation presents novel swarm control strategies with these properties for detecting and mapping static targets, which represent features of interest, in an unknown, bounded, obstacle-free environment. The robots move on a finite spatial grid according to the time-homogeneous transition probabilities of a Discrete-Time Discrete-State (DTDS) Markov chain model, and they exchange information with other robots within their communication range using a consensus (agreement) protocol. This dissertation extend theoretical guarantees on multi-robot consensus over fixed and time-varying communication networks with known connectivity properties to consensus over the networks that have Markovian switching dynamics and no presumed connectivity. This dissertation develops such swarm consensus strategies for detecting a single feature in the environment, tracking multiple features, and reconstructing a discrete distribution of features modeled as an occupancy grid map. The proposed consensus approaches are validated in numerical simulations and in 3D physics-based simulations of quadrotors in Gazebo. The scalability of the proposed approaches is examined through extensive numerical simulation studies over different swarm populations and environment sizes.

The purpose of this project is to artistically express that our perceptions of the visual world are interrupted due to the often overlooked blinking of our eyes. The project was guided by two questions: 1) How is blink rate related to thought and emotion? 2) How does the process of blinking provide context to our life experiences? To link these two concepts together, I constructed a creative editing device that uses a live video feed of the user's eye blinking to randomly launch pre-existing footage of the user's significant life events. The process of creating this project occurred in three distinct steps. In the first step, I recorded 30-second videos to be used as a demonstration when exhibiting the device. In the second step, I attached a camera to a head mount to output a real time video of my eye blinking. In the third step, I created a Max patch that used the video feed of my eye as a trigger to play my pre-recorded clips. The final result was an evocative non-linear narrative of past personal experiences, and the development of the narrative itself is similar to the way in which humans recall memories. The visuals of the blinking eye were placed adjacent to the pre-recorded footage in order to mimic the positioning of two eyes on a face; one side of the display shows my actual eye, and the other side signifies looking back on what my eye has seen. The intended effect was to generate an awareness of the breaks in our vision and how this influences our existence.

The purpose of this project is to artistically express that our perceptions of the visual world are interrupted due to the often overlooked blinking of our eyes. The project was guided by two questions: 1) How is blink rate related to thought and emotion? 2) How does the process of blinking provide context to our life experiences? To link these two concepts together, I constructed a creative editing device that uses a live video feed of the user's eye blinking to randomly launch pre-existing footage of the user's significant life events. The process of creating this project occurred in three distinct steps. In the first step, I recorded 30-second videos to be used as a demonstration when exhibiting the device. In the second step, I attached a camera to a head mount to output a real time video of my eye blinking. In the third step, I created a Max patch that used the video feed of my eye as a trigger to play my pre-recorded clips. The final result was an evocative non-linear narrative of past personal experiences, and the development of the narrative itself is similar to the way in which humans recall memories. The visuals of the blinking eye were placed adjacent to the pre-recorded footage in order to mimic the positioning of two eyes on a face; one side of the display shows my actual eye, and the other side signifies looking back on what my eye has seen. The intended effect was to generate an awareness of the breaks in our vision and how this influences our existence.

The intention for the dance production Story was to develop and explore a collaborative creative process to communicate a specific narrative to an audience. The production took place in the Margaret Gisolo Dance Studio at Arizona State University on November 18, 19, and 20, 2011. The purpose of my thesis work was to investigate how my personal inspiration from classical ballet, balletic movement vocabulary, fantasy narrative (an imaginative fictional story), supportive lighting, set, costumes and expressive sound might merge within a collaborative dance-making process. The final choreography includes creative input from the participating dancers and designers, as well as constructive feedback from my thesis committee. My reflection on the creative process for Story describes the challenges and personal growth I experienced as a result of the project.