PLease join us for an Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty candidate lecture from:
Xi Yu, Assistant Professor, West Virginia University
Thursday March 28, at 1pm in ITE 401
or via webex:
Talk Title
Sailing with the Uncertainty - Multi-Robot Systems in a Dynamic World
Abstract
Autonomous technologies are urgently needed for tasks that occur in challenging environments and require solutions that can persistently operate for long durations. As tasks become more complex, teams of robots can work more efficiently and add new capabilities through cooperation, coordination, and collaboration across individuals. Individual robots in a multi-robot team not only interact with the environment but also with each other which enables them to jointly deliver collective solution strategies that, ideally, are robust, resilient, and secure. Real-world networks synthesized by connections across individuals usually face difficulties due to a lack of environmental consistency, accessibility, and structure. Robots can leverage their mobility to regenerate connections while existing ones fail, generating time-varying networks with links that emerge and disappear over time. The dynamics in the environments may cause irregular robot movements and wireless attenuations, therefore introducing randomness in the synthesis, the timing, and the connection quality of the temporal links. Such stochastic networks are beyond the scope of current graph theory tools. This talk introduces examples of multi-robot systems deployed in a semi-structured dynamic environment, the synthesis of time-varying, stochastic robotic networks, and the control and mitigation methods designed for the uncertainty carried in such systems.
Xi’s Bio
Xi Yu is an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at West Virginia University. Before joining WVU in January 2021, she was a postdoctoral associate at the GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. She received a B.S. and a Dipl.-Ing. in mechanical engineering from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). In 2018, she received a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Boston University. Xi's main research interests include exploring challenging environments (i.e. large-scale environments with intrinsic dynamics, uncertainties, or dangers) with teams of robots that are subject to restrictions in actuation, sensing, and communication capabilities, and to forward the understanding of the time-varying, stochastic networks synthesized by the robot teams.
For more information, contact: Brandy Ciraldo at brandy.ciraldo@uconn.edu