Faculty Candidate - COLLOQUIUM

Multi-Robot Search in the Physical World

Geoffrey A. Hollinger

Robotics Institute

Carnegie Mellon University,

Computer Science and Robotics Engineering

Faculty Candidate

Tuesday, March 9, 2010
11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Fuller Labs 320

Abstract:

This talk considers the problem of coordinating a team of robots to locate a target in an environment or to authoritatively say that one does not exist. Such a scenario may occur in urban search and rescue, military operations, and even aged care. The search must be robust (deal with robot failures), decentralized (reduce computational and communication bottlenecks), and reactive (make use of any pertinent information that becomes available during search). Prior methods in the literature would force you to make one of two assumptions in this scenario. Do you make the worst-case assumption and choose to treat the target as adversarial? The robots could then utilize graph search algorithms to guarantee finding the target, but the search might take an unnecessarily long time. Or do you decide to trust some non-adversarial model of the target? The robots could then optimize the search with respect to that model, but this approach would eliminate guarantees if the model is inaccurate. In this case, the target may avoid the robots entirely. However, it is possible to do better; how can we strike a balance between risky average-case search and conservative worst-case search?

The subject of this talk is the development of an architecture that combines the two search paradigms described above to generate plans that clear an environment of a worst-case adversarial target and have good average-case performance considering a non-adversarial motion model.

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Geoffrey Hollinger is a Ph.D. Candidate at Carnegie Mellon University in the Robotics Institute. He is currently interested in designing scalable and distributed algorithms for estimation and multi-robot coordination in the physical world. He has worked on personal robotics at Intel Research Pittsburgh, active estimation at the University of Pennsylvania's GRASP Laboratory, and miniature inspection robots for the Space Shuttle at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. He holds an M.S. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.S. in General Engineering along with a B.A. in Philosophy from Swarthmore College.

Host: Prof. Michael Gennert

Refreshments will be served.

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Last modified: 02/25/2010