03/11/2024
By Kshitij Jerath

Robotics/Swarms talk on Robot Collectives: Resilience and Human Teaming by Julie Adams (Oregon State University)

Where: DAN 321
When: Friday, March 22 at noon

What: Resilient algorithms for robot collectives are necessary to enable colonies or swarms of robots to effectively conduct missions in the real world and to enable a single human to overcome traditional human factors limitations of supervising such large complex systems. Real world robotic deployments must be resilient across a wide variety of uncertainties. Our co-developed resilience framework and metrics has informed developing a fundamental understanding of the resilience in biologically inspired robot colony consensus decision making algorithms. Deploying heterogeneous robotic collectives en masse has also been a significant research challenge. The DARPA OFFSET program focused on such swarms in urban environments for multiple hour missions. This program facilitated physiologically assessing a single swarm commander’s workload when deploying 100+ robots, resulting in the first true evidence that such human-to-robot ratios are attainable. These results can impact future system development for disaster response, package delivery, and climate change applications.

Who: Julie Adams is the founder of the Human-Machine Teaming Laboratory and the Associate Director of Research of the Collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Systems (CoRIS) Institute. Adams has focused on human-machine teaming and distributed artificial intelligence for almost thirty-five years. Throughout her career she has focused on unmanned systems, but also focused on crewed civilian and military aircraft at Honeywell, Inc. and commercial, consumer and industrial systems at the Eastman Kodak Company. Her research, which is grounded in robotics applications for domains such as first response, archaeology, oceanography, and the U.S. military, focuses on distributed artificial intelligence, swarms, robotics and human-machine teaming. Adams is an NSF CAREER award recipient, an Army Mad Scientist, a Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Fellow and was recently appointed to the DARPA Information Science and Technology Study Group.

Any questions? Reach out to Kshitij_Jerath@uml.edu