Keynote Talk by Seth Hutchinson: Robust Distributed Control Policies for Multi-Robot Systems

Title: Robust Distributed Control Policies for Multi-Robot Systems

Speaker: Seth Hutchinson, University of Illinois

Summary: In this talk, I will describe our recent progress in developing fault-tolerant distributed control policies for multi-robot systems. We consider two problems: rendezvous and coverage. For the former, the goal is to bring all robots to a common location, while for the latter the goal is to deploy robots to achieve optimal coverage of an environment.
We consider the case in which each robot is an autonomous decision maker that is anonymous, memoryless, and dimensionless, i.e., robots are indistinguishable to one another, make decisions based upon only current information, and do not consider collisions. Each robot has a limited sensing range, and is able to directly estimate the state of only those robots within that sensing range, which induces a network topology for the multi-robot system. We assume that it is not possible for the fault-free robots to identify the faulty robots (e.g., due to the anonymous property of the robots). For each problem, we provide an efficient computational framework and analysis of algorithms, all of which converge in the face of faulty robots under a few assumptions on the network topology and sensing abilities. .

Biography: Seth Hutchinson Hutchinson received his Ph.D. from Purdue University in 1988. In 1990 he joined the faculty at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, where he is currently a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Coordinated Science Laboratory, and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. He served as Associate Department Head of ECE from 2001 to 2007. He currently serves on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Robotics Research and the Journal of Intelligent Service Robotics, and chairs the steering committee of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. He was Founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society's Conference Editorial Board (2006-2008), and Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transaction on Robotics (2008-2013). He has published more than 200 papers on the topics of robotics and computer vision, and is coauthor of the books "Principles of Robot Motion: Theory, Algorithms, and Implementations," published by MIT Press, and "Robot Modeling and Control," published by Wiley. Hutchinson is a Fellow of the IEEE.

Date of the event: 
Thursday, 13 October, 2016 - 10:20 to 10:50
Conference Name: 
Place/Room: 
Grand Ballroom, Daejeon Convention Center (DCC)