Distributed Protocols for Cooperative Multi-Robot Systems

Department of Electrical Engineering Seminar

"Distributed Protocols for Cooperative Multi-Robot Systems"

Jeff Shamma
Professor
Department of Electrical Engineering
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)

In cooperative multi-robot systems, there is a group of robots that seek to achieve a collective task as a team. Each individual robot makes decisions based on available local information as well as limited communications with neighboring robots. The challenge is to design local protocols that result in desired global outcomes. In contrast to a traditional centralized control paradigm, both measurements and decisions are distributed among multiple actors. This talk surveys various results for cooperative robotics based on methods drawn from game theory and distributed optimization, with applications to area coverage, cooperative pursuit, and self-assembly.

Jeff S. Shamma is a Professor of Electrical Engineering at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) and the Director of the Center of Excellence for NEOM Research at KAUST. He received a Ph.D. in systems science and engineering from MIT in 1988. Prior to joining KAUST, he was the Julian T. Hightower Chair in Systems & Control in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech. He is a Fellow of IEEE and IFAC, and a recipient of the NSF Young Investigator Award, the American Automatic Control Council’s Donald P. Eckman Award, and Mohammed Dahleh Distinguished Lecture Award. Professor Shamma is currently the deputy editor-in-chief for the IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems and a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Control Systems Society.

Thursday, November 15
3:00 pm
Room 335, 17 Hillhouse