Abstract:

There is an increasing trend for robots to serve as network mobile sensing platforms that can collect data and interact with humans in various types of environment. This need for undisturbed operation posts higher goals for autonomy.

This talk reviews recent developments in autonomous collective foraging in a complex environment that can explicitly integrates insights from biology with models and provable strategies from control theory and robotics. These methods were rigorously developed and tightly integrated with an experimental effort that achieved promising results.

Bio:

Dr. Fumin Zhang is an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech.

He received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, College Park in Electrical Engineering in 2004. From 2004 to 2007, he held a postdoctoral position at Princeton University.

His research interests include mobile sensor networks, maritime robotics, control systems, and theoretical foundations for cyber-physical systems.

He received a NSF CAREER Award in September 2009, the Lockheed Inspirational Young Faculty Award in March 2010, the ONR Young Investigator Program Award in April 2010, and the GT Roger P. Webb Outstanding Junior Faculty Award in April 2011.

He is currently serving as the co-chair for the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Marine Robotics and the chair for the IEEE CSS Technical Committee on Robotic Control and Manufacturing Automation.