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Drexel Robotics Seminar Series: Dylan Shell, Texas A&M University, “Unifying Two Views of Multi-Robot Task-Allocation”

April 2, 2015 @ 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm

Abstract

 In this talk I will describe recent research toward the goal of engineering multi-robot systems to form networks of efficient, cooperative, taskable agents. I shall consider variations of the multi-robot task allocation (assignment) problem, wherein one aims at finding the best matching between a set of robots and a set of tasks so that the team’s performance will be optimized. The assignment problem is one of the most popular formulations for optimizing the group synergy, and has a long history including work in Operations Research and AI communities. Starting from two seemingly disconnected views of the problem, one from each of those communities, I’ll describe new algorithms that bring those two perspectives together. The results show improvements in performance, scalability, and robustness for general-purpose coordinated mobile robot systems.

Presenter

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Dylan Shell currently lives—like Schrödinger’s cat—in a superposition of states: being an assistant/associate professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University. He is a computer scientist, having received degrees in computational & applied mathematics and computer science (from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa), and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California. His research aims to synthesize and analyze complex, intelligent behavior in distributed systems that exploit their physical embedding to interact with the physical world.

He has published papers on multi-robot task allocation, robotics for emergency scenarios, biologically inspired multiple robot systems, multi-robot routing, estimation of group-level swarm properties, minimalist manipulation, rigid-body simulation and contact models, human-robot interaction, and robotic theatre. His work has been funded by DARPA and the NSF; and he has been the recipient of the Montague Teaching award, the George Beckey Service award, and the NSF Career.

Details

Date:
April 2, 2015
Time:
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Event Category: