Professor and Chair of the Computer Science Department at Brigham Young University Michael A. Goodrich will speak on Thursday, March 28 as part of the CSE Colloquium Series. His talk, "Toward Human Interaction with Bio-Inspired Robot Swarms," will be at 4 p.m. in Avery 115 and preceded by a reception at 3:30 p.m. in Avery 348.
Abstract: Bio-inspired robot swarms are being designed and studied for many problems including search, pollution monitoring and control, and security. These swarms have some important advantages compared to traditional multi-agent AI approaches, including: resilience to robot attrition, robustness to communication failures, ability to explore multiple solutions to a single problem, and ability to appropriately (re)distribute resources when problems arise. These advantages come from how decentralized computation and sensing of the robots lead to robust emergent collective behaviors A fundamental challenge is figuring out how to allow humans to influence and manage swarms without imposing the human as a single point of failure, defeating the advantage of decentralized/emergent behaviors. In this talk, I will discuss our approach to enable a human to manage and influence swarms.
Bio: Michael A. Goodrich is a professor and the chair of the Computer Science Department at Brigham Young University. He's published a lot peer-reviewed papers in a lot of areas including human-robot interaction, decision theory, artificial intelligence, intelligent vehicles, and multi-agent systems; and he's been grateful to receive funding for students and research from ONR, ARL, NASA, NSF, DARPA, Honda, INL, and Nissan Motor Company. He helped create and organize the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, and the open-source Journal of Human-Robot Interaction. He likes to run to blow off steam and to enable him to eat high-calorie peanut M&Ms.