SPS ASI Webinar: How to Act as a Team - Multi-Robot Coordination
Date: 21 May 2024
Time: 4:00 PM (CET)
Presenter(s): Dr. Bernhard Rinner
The ASI Webinar Series is an event initiated by the Autonomous System Initiative (ASI) of the IEEE Signal Processing (SP) Society. The goal is to offer the SP community with free webinars looking into the future of autonomous systems. These monthly webinars are hosted on Zoom, with recordings made available in the IEEE ASI’s YouTube channel following the live events.
Abstract
Now that robots have evolved from bulky platforms to agile devices, a challenge is to combine multiple robots into an integrated autonomous system, offering functionality that individual robots cannot achieve. A key building block for this integration is coordination, which is concerned with sharing knowledge, joint decision making, and allocation of computation tasks to processing nodes. Different levels of coordination exist—ranging from high-level functions, like the assignment of system-wide tasks and resources, down to low-level control, like collision avoidance, flight formations, and joint sensor usage for state estimation.
In this talk, I will present different coordination techniques for multi-robot systems, discuss their usage in prototypical multi-robot applications such as path planning, swarming and surveillance, and demonstrate deployments in unmanned aerial vehicles.
Biography
Bernhard Rinner is professor at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria where he is heading the Pervasive Computing group. He is deputy head of the Institute of Networked and Embedded Systems and serves as vice dean of the Faculty of Technical Sciences. Before joining Klagenfurt he was with Graz University of Technology and held research positions at the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin in 1995 and 1998/99. His current research interests include embedded computing, sensor networks multi-robot systems and pervasive computing. Together with partners from four European universities, he has jointly initiated the Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate Program on Interactive and Cognitive Environments (ICE). He is senior member of IEEE and member of the board of the Austrian Science Fund.
