As the robots are leaving their cages on the manufacturing floors and enter our daily lives, they must be able to interact with people as well as with other robots. In this talk we will discuss some of the challenges associated with this, with particular focus on robot-robot interactions. In fact, by now we have a fairly good understanding of how to design coordinated control strategies for making teams of mobile robots achieve geometric objectives in a distributed manner, such as assembling shapes or covering areas. But, the mapping from high-level tasks to geometric objectives is not particularly well understood. In this talk, we investigate this topic in the context of the Robotarium, which is a remotely accessible swarm robotics research testbed where over a hundred ground and air vehicles can be tasked with performing coordinated maneuvers in a safe and effective manner. This development will involve the composition of co-called barrier certificates for encoding the tasks and safety constraints, as well as a brief detour into ecology as a way of understanding how persistence can be achieved by studying animals with low-energy life-styles, such as the three-toed sloth.

 

Magnus Egerstedt is the Executive Director for the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he also holds the Julian T. Hightower Chair in Systems and Controls in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He received the M.S. degree in Engineering Physics and the Ph.D. degree in Applied Mathematics from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, the B.A. degree in Philosophy from Stockholm University, and was a Postdoctoral Scholar at Harvard University. Dr. Egerstedt conducts research in the areas of control theory and robotics, with particular focus on control and coordination of complex networks, such as multi-robot systems, mobile sensor networks, and cyber-physical systems. Magnus Egerstedt is a Fellow of the IEEE, and has received a number of teaching and research awards, including the Ragazzini Award from the American Automatic Control Council, the Outstanding Doctoral Advisor Award and the HKN Outstanding Teacher Award from Georgia Tech, and the Alumni of the Year Award from the Royal Institute of Technology.