RI | Seminar | September 5

Robotics Institute Special Seminar, September 5
Time and Place | Seminar Abstract | Speaker Biography | Speaker Appointments

Heterogeneous Mobile Sensor Net Planning and Deployment Using Robot Herding

Lynne Parker
University of Tennessee

Time and Place

NSH 3305
Refreshments 9:45 am
Talk 10:00 am

Abstract

This talk discusses our approach for deploying a team of mobile sensor robots to form a sensor network in indoor environments. The challenge in this work is that the mobile sensor robots have no ability for localization or obstacle avoidance. Thus, our approach entails the use of more capable "helper" robots that "herd" the mobile sensor robots into their deployment positions. I discuss the advance pre-planning stage that determines where sensor robots (up to 70) should be deployed using a map of the environment, the division of the deployment positions into smaller groups for deployment, and the actual "herding" of the mobile sensor robots to these deployment positions. Once the mobile sensor robots are deployed, they are used as a distributed acoustic sensor network. These techniques will be used as part of a DARPA demonstration of 100 robots in an indoor "search and protect" application.

Speaker Biography

Prof. Lynne Parker joined the faculty of the Department of Computer Science at The University of Tennessee (UT) as Associate Professor in August 2002. She also holds an appointment as Adjunct Distinguished Research and Development Staff Member at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where she worked as a full-time researcher for several years. Lynne began the Distributed Intelligence Laboratory at UT in August 2002, which focuses on research in multi-robot systems and distributed artificial intelligence. She has published over 70 articles in the areas of mobile robot cooperation, human-robot cooperation, robotic learning, intelligent agent architectures, and robot navigation, including four edited books on the topic of distributed robotics. In 2000, she was awarded the U. S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers for her research in multi-robot systems. Lynne received her Ph.D. degree in computer science from MIT.

Speaker Appointments

For appointments, please contact John Dolan (jmd@cs.cmu.edu)