From Coordination to Collaboration in Multi-Robot Systems: Lessons from Ecology

Abstract: The standard approach to multi-robot systems is to divide the team-level tasks into suitable building blocks and have the robots solve their respective subtasks in a coordinated manner. However, by bringing together robots of different types, it should be possible to arrive at completely new capabilities and skill-sets. In other words, the whole could become greater than the sum of its parts. Inspired by the ecological concept of a mutualism, i.e. the interaction between two or more species that benefit everyone involved, this idea is formalized through the composition of barrier functions for encoding collaborative arrangements in terms of expansions and contractions of relevant sets. Contextualized in a long-duration setting for robots deployed over long time scales, where optimality has to take a backseat to “survivability,” example scenarios include robotic environmental monitoring, safe learning and remote access in the Robotarium, which is a multi-robot lab that has been in (almost) continuous operation for over five years.

Bio: Magnus Egerstedt is the dean of engineering and a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the UC Irvine. Prior to joining UCI, Egerstedt was on the faculty at the Georgia Institute of Technology, serving as the chair in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Director for Georgia Tech's Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines. He received the M.S. degree in engineering physics and the Ph.D. degree in applied mathematics from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, the B.A. degree in philosophy from Stockholm University, and was a postdoctoral scholar at Harvard University. Egerstedt conducts research in the areas of control theory and robotics, with particular focus on control and coordination of multi-robot systems. Egerstedt is a fellow of IEEE and IFAC, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Science and serves as the president of the IEEE Control Systems Society. He has received a number of teaching and research awards, including the Ragazzini Award, the O. Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award and the Alumni of the Year Award from the Royal Institute of Technology.