Distributed Coordination and Estimation in Robotic Swarms

Department of Electrical Engineering Seminar Series

Distributed Coordination and Estimation in Robotic Swarms
Professor Sonia Martinez
University of California, San Diego

Abstract: Self-organization and coordinated behavior are widespread phenomena in nature with unique characteristics that greatly inspire the design of robotic swarms, including graceful degradation, adaptiveness, and resilience. As in biological ensembles, each robotic agent reacts to local information and yet, complex collective behavior should emerge. To make this vision a reality, a new engineering of autonomy should overcome the challenges imposed by the limited agent capabilities to integrate coherently the individual components and guarantee predictability, safety, and robustness. This talk presents our progress on the design of coordination algorithms for motion, estimation and self-organization of multiple robots, while discussing modeling approaches, analysis tools, and architectural trade-offs in small to large-sized robotic swarms.

Bio: Sonia Martinez is a Professor with the department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Martinez received her Ph.D. degree in Engineering Mathematics from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain, in May 2002. Following a year as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Technical University of Catalonia, Spain, she obtained a Postdoctoral Fulbright Fellowship and held appointments at the Coordinated Science Laboratory of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign during 2004, and at the Center for Control, Dynamical systems and Computation (CCDC) of the University of California, Santa Barbara during 2005. In a broad sense, Dr Martínez' research interests include the control of multi-agent systems, nonlinear control theory, and robotics. For her work on the control of underactuated mechanical systems she received the Best Student Paper award at the 2002 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control. She was the recipient of a NSF CAREER Award in 2007. For the paper "Motion coordination with Distributed Information," co-authored with Jorge Cortés and Francesco Bullo, she received the 2008 Control Systems Magazine Outstanding Paper Award. She has served on the editorial boards of the European Journal of Control, and currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Geometric Mechanics as well as the IEEE Transactions on Control of Networked Systems as a Senior Editor.

February 2, 2017
3:30 PM
Becton Seminar Room