Speaker
Professor
Mac
Schwager
Boston
University
Title
Optimal Sensing of Dynamic Environments with Multiple Robots
Abstract
This talk will discuss the problem of multi-robot active estimation, in which sensing robots must control their motion in order to gather the most valuable information about a time-changing environment. I will cast this as a stochastic optimal control problem where the robots' objective function is to minimize the expected entropy of an environment state estimate formed from a recursive Bayesian filter. I will discuss the prohibitive complexity of solving this problem in general, and will consider two solutions for special cases. The first is a myopic heuristic in which robots follow the gradient of mutual information. The second is to consider sensing trajectories for a linear-Gaussian environment model. Using Pontryagin's Principle I will formulate a boundary value problem whose solution yields locally optimal sensing trajectories for this environment model. Efforts toward overcoming the challenges of decentralization and scalability will also be discussed.
Speaker's biography
Mac Schwager is an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Boston University. He obtained a PhD degree from MIT in 2009, an MS degree from MIT in 2005, and a BS degree in 2000 from Stanford University. He was a postdoctoral researcher in the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing, and Perception (GRASP) Lab at the University of Pennsylvania from 2010 to 2011. His research interests are in distributed algorithms for control, estimation, and learning in groups of robots and animals.
Invited by Professor Stephen L. Smith