CPS Events
CPSRC Seminar Series - Ants Don't Use WiFi: Enabling Robotic Agents to Collaborate and Compete without a Communication Network
Abstract:
In the animal world there is no WiFi---agents collaborate and compete by sensing and predicting the actions of teammates, rivals, predators, and prey. Likewise, in the engineered world, many of the most promising applications for autonomous robots require them to interact with other agents in the world by sensing and predicting their actions. Autonomous driving in traffic, collision avoidance for UAVs, and human-robot teaming are key examples where a wireless network either cannot exist, or will not exist for some time. In competitive scenarios, such as racing or pursuit-evasion, agents would not want to communicate even if they could. In this talk I will describe several recent examples from my lab of algorithms enabling multiple robotic agents to interact, both collaboratively and competitively, without a communication network. I will discuss a communication-free multi-robot manipulation algorithm by which many simple robots cooperate to transport a payload too large for any one of them to move alone. I will describe a highly scalable collision avoidance strategy, and a related pursuit-evasion strategy, that only requires agents to sense the positions of nearby neighbors. Finally, I will present a game theoretic receding horizon control algorithm for autonomous drone racing, in which drones sense each other's position with a monocular camera. I will show results from hardware experiments with ground robots, scale autonomous cars, and quadrotor UAVs collaborating and competing in the scenarios above.
Bio:
Mac Schwager is an assistant professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University. He directs the Multi-robot Systems Lab (MSL) where he studies distributed algorithms for control, perception, and learning in groups of robots and autonomous systems. He is interested in a range of applications including cooperative surveillance with teams of UAVs, agile formation control and collision avoidance for UAVs, autonomous driving in traffic, cooperative robotic manipulation, and autonomous drone racing. He obtained his BS degree from Stanford, and his MS and PhD degrees from MIT. He was a postdoctoral researcher in the GRASP lab at the University of Pennsylvania, and in CSAIL at MIT. Prior to joining Stanford, he was an assistant professor at Boston University from 2012 to 2015. He received the NSF CAREER award in 2014, the DARPA YFA in 2018, and has received numerous best paper awards in conferences and journals including the IEEE Transactions on Robotics King-Sun Fu best paper award in 2016.
CPSRC Seminar Series - Temporal Logic Robustness: Applications to Synthesis and Analysis of Autonomous Systems
Abstract:
Many autonomous (or highly automated) systems are also safety critical. Due to their safety critical nature, they must adhere to well defined requirements typically in pairs of assumptions and guarantees. An ongoing research challenge is to develop a specification formalism to rule them all. That is, the formalism has to be expressive enough to capture all requirements of interest while at the same time it has to be computationally efficient in order to be used in automated analysis and design. Temporal logics have proven to be an excellent choice when considering their expressive power and computational efficiency. In this talk, we will review the theory of robustness of temporal logics as applied to Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). We will highlight the connections between synthesis and analysis methods with respect to temporal logic requirements and their robust interpretation. In addition, we will show how some verification and specification mining problems can be translated into optimization problems using the notion of robustness. In terms of applications, we will demonstrate how temporal logic requirements can help us in automated testing of autonomous vehicles and perception systems, and in the planning and coordination of groups of vehicles under different access right levels.
Bio:
Georgios Fainekos is an Associate Professor at the School of Computing, Informatics and Decision Systems Engineering (SCIDSE) at Arizona State University (ASU). He is director of the Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) Lab and he is currently affiliated with the NSF I/UCR Center for Embedded Systems (CES) and the Robotics Faculty Group at ASU. He received his Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2008 where he was affiliated with the GRASP laboratory. He holds a Diploma degree (B.Sc. & M.Sc.) in Mechanical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). Before joining ASU, he held a Postdoctoral Researcher position at NEC Laboratories America in the System Analysis & Verification Group. His technical expertise is on applied logic, formal verification, testing, control theory, artificial intelligence, and optimization. His research has applications to automotive systems, medical devices, autonomous (ground and aerial) vehicles, and human-robot interaction (HRI). In 2013, Dr. Fainekos received the NSF CAREER award and the ASU SCIDSE Best Researcher Junior Faculty Award. He is also recipient of the 2008 Frank Anger Memorial ACM SIGBED/SIGSOFT Student Award. His software toolbox, S-TaLiRo, for testing and monitoring of CPS has been nominated twice as a technological breakthrough by the industry. In 2016, Dr. Fainekos was the program co-Chair for the ACM International Conference on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control (HSCC).
From Shakey to Motobot: Robotics at SRI International
Abstract:
SRI researchers have a rich tradition of pushing the boundaries of robotics. Our heritage includes Shakey, the first intelligent mobile robot, the foundational telepresence technology used in Intuitive Surgical's DaVinci surgical system, and electroactive polymer "artificial muscle" for bio-inspired robots. SRI has continued to innovate in several areas of robotics ranging from intelligent system to new components and materials. This talk will highlight our recent work in electroactive materials for soft robotics, massively parallel manufacturing using diamagnetically-levitated microrobots, electroadhesive gripping, next-generation telepresence manipulation, wearable robotics, and breakthrough work in more efficient and infinitely variable mechanical transmissions. We will also show the successors to Shakey: Motobot - a robot that can race a stock motor cycle, Proxy - a biologically-inspired robot that walks efficiently, and an apple-picking robot now being commercialized by Abundant robotics.
Presenters:
The presentation will be given by the researchers in SRI's Robotics Laboratory who have led the efforts described above. These presenters include: Roy Kornbluh, Annjoe Wong-Foy, Allen Hsu, Thomas Low, Alexander Kernbaum and Gordon Kirkwood.
Small UAV Autonomy: Time-Coordinated Missions
Seminar presentation begins at 2:00 pm until 3:00 - reception with refreshments from 3:00 to 3:30 pm.
Abstract:
The urgent need to integrate Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs) into the national airspace requires that these vehicles posses high levels of autonomy and are capable of executing complex missions in a safe, reliable manner. A large subset of these missions requires that UAVs arrive at their final destinations either at the same time or separated by pre-defined time intervals. This first part of the talk will introduce many examples of such missions and will proceed to discuss in some detail the technologies involved. A representative example includes the challenging mission scenario where the vehicles are tasked to cooperatively execute collision-free maneuvers and arrive at their final destinations at the same time (time-critical operations). In the setup adopted, the vehicles are assigned nominal spatial paths and speed profiles along these paths. The paths are then appropriately parameterized and the vehicles are requested to execute cooperative path following, rather than “open loop” trajectory tracking maneuvers. This strategy yields robust behavior against external disturbances by allowing the vehicles to negotiate their speeds along the paths in response to information exchanged over the dynamic inter-vehicle communications network.
The talk addresses explicitly the situation where each vehicle transmits its coordination information to only a subset of the other vehicles, as determined by the communications topology. Furthermore, we consider the case where the communication graph that captures the underlying communications topology is disconnected during some interval of time or even fails to be connected at all times. Conditions are given under which the complete time-critical cooperative path-following closed-loop system is stable and yields convergence of a conveniently defined cooperation error to a neighborhood of the origin. Flight test results demonstrate the efficacy of the multi-UAV cooperative control framework presented in this part of the talk.
Biography:
Isaac Kaminer received PhD in Electrical Engineering from University of Michigan in 1992. Before that he spent four years working at Boeing Commercial first as a control engineer in 757/767/747-400 Flight Management Computer Group and then as an engineer in Flight Control Research Group. Since 1992 he has been with the Naval Postgraduate School first at the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department and currently at the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering where he is a Professor. He has a total of over 20 years of experience in development and flight testing of guidance, navigation and control algorithms for both manned and unmanned aircraft. His more recent efforts were focused on development of coordinated control strategies for multiple UAVs and vision based guidance laws for multiple UAVs. Professor Kaminer has co-authored more than a hundred refereed journal and conference publications.
CPSRC Seminar Series: Real-time Control of Spatial Dose Delivery in Plasma Medicine
Abstract:
Atmospheric pressure plasma jets (APPJs) have widespread use in materials processing and biomedical applications. Safe and effective operation of hand-held APPJs is however highly sensitive to the intrinsic variability of plasma characteristics as well as to exogenous disturbances such as variations in the separation distance between the device tip and target surface. Key challenges in feedback control of APPJs arise from the need to: (i) handle the nonlinear, multivariable nature of plasma dynamics, (ii) retain the system operation in a constrained region for safe and reliable operation, and (iii) realize multiple (possibly conflicting) plasma dose delivery objectives. In this talk, we will demonstrate the importance of using model-based control strategies for safe, reproducible, and therapeutically effective application of APPJs for dose delivery in plasma medicine.
Bio:
Ali Mesbah is Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley. Before joining UC Berkeley, he was a senior postdoctoral associate at MIT. He holds a Ph.D. degree in systems and control from Delft University of Technology. He is a senior member of the IEEE Control Systems Society and AIChE. He is on the IEEE Control Systems Society conference editorial board as well as the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Radiation and Plasma Medical Sciences. He is the recipient of the AIChE's 35 Under 35 Award in 2017, the IEEE Control Systems Outstanding Paper Award in 2017, and the AIChE CAST W. David Smith, Jr. Graduation Publication Award in 2015. His research interests are in the areas of optimization-based systems analysis, fault diagnosis, and predictive control of uncertain systems.
