Christopher Banks | Robotics PhD Candidate; School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology

Abstract: As humans begin working more frequently in environments with multi-agent systems, they are presented with challenges on how to control these systems in an intuitive manner. Current approaches tend to limit either the interaction ability of the user or limit the expressive capacity of instructions given to the robots. Applications that utilize temporal logics provide a human-readable syntax for systems that ensures formal guarantees for specification completion. By providing a modality for global task specification, we seek to reduce cognitive load and allow for high-level objectives to be communicated to a multi-agent system. In addition to this, we also seek to expand the capabilities of swarms to understand desired actions via interpretable commands retrieved from a human.

Committee

Dr. Magnus Egerstedt (Primary Advisor) – Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine
Dr. Samuel Coogan (Co-Advisor) — School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Sonia Chernova – School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Seth Hutchinson —  School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Ye Zhao – School of Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology