Keynote Speaker

TITLE

Integrating human and robot decision-making dynamics

ABSTRACT

Humans and robots each have strengths and weaknesses associated with making good decisions to address complex tasks in uncertain, changing environments. We investigate how humans and robots can best jointly contribute to decision making so that strengths are exploited and weaknesses compensated. Our approach to this integration problem is to leverage experimental and modeling work of psychologists on human decision making. We seek commonality between the kinds of decisions humans make in complex tasks and the kinds of decisions humans make in psychology experiments; when commonality conditions are met, the psychology results can be used to predict how humans will behave in the complex task. A problem well studied in the psychology literature is the two-alternative forced-choice task, in which the human subject chooses between two options at regular time intervals and receives a reward after each choice. Interestingly, experiments show convergence of the aggregate behavior to rewards that are often suboptimal.
We introduce a decision-making problem associated with a complex task that integrates human and robotic decision-making dynamics with feedback. The setting is a human-supervised collective robotic foraging problem, where the human decision-making takes the form of a two-alternative forced-choice task and the reward report is a feedback from the robots. Using a popular, experimentally verified, decision-making model, we prove convergence of the human behavior to the observed aggregate decision making for reward structures with matching points. Since behavior converges to suboptimal performance, we show how adaptive laws for the robot feedback, which use only local information, can be applied to help the human make optimal decisions.

BIO

Naomi Ehrich Leonard is the Edwin S. Wilsey Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and associated faculty member of the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University where she has been since 1994. In 2001 she was the Lise Meitner Guest Professor at Lund University, Sweden and in 2007 a Visiting Professor at University of Pisa, Italy. She received the B.S.E. degree in mechanical engineering from Princeton University in 1985. From 1985 to 1989, she worked as an engineer in the electric power industry. She received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland in 1991 and 1994. Her research is in nonlinear control and dynamics with current interests in cooperative control for multi-agent systems, mobile sensor networks, adaptive ocean sampling, collective behavior in fish schools and decision dynamics in mixed human/robot teams. She became an IEEE Fellow in 2007 and received the Mohammed Dahleh Award (2005), John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2004), Automatica Prize Paper award (1999), ONR Young Investigator Award (1998) and NSF CAREER Award (1995). She has served as associate editor for Automatica and SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization.

TITLE

Architectures, abstractions, and algorithms for large teams of robots

ABSTRACT

Networked robots represent the convergence of robotics, sensor networks and mobile ad-hoc networks, with many applications and a growing market projected to be $200B in 2013. This talk will focus on some fundamental problems and practical issues underlying the deployment of large numbers of autonomously functioning robots. The central problem is the so-called inverse problem of deriving individual robot behaviors for a desired group behavior. There are numerous examples of group behavior in biology which suggest that analysis of swarming behaviors in biology may provide insight for the synthesis of collective behaviors for engineered systems. I will present a methodology for modeling and analyzing such collective behaviors and discuss architectures, abstractions and algorithms for the control of large networks of robots.

BIO

VIJAY KUMAR is the UPS Foundation Professor and the Associate Dean in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from The Ohio State University in 1985 and 1987 respectively. He has been on the Faculty in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics with a secondary appointment in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania since 1987.
Dr. Kumar served as the Deputy Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science from 2000-2004. He directed the GRASP Laboratory, a multidisciplinary robotics and perception laboratory, from 1998-2004. He was the Chairman of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics from 2005-2008.
Dr. Kumar's research interests lie in the area of robotics and networked multi-agent systems. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and a Fellow of the Institution of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). He has served on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, Journal of Franklin Institute, IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, ASME Journal of Mechanical Design and the ASME Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics. He is the recipient of the 1991 National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator award, the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, the 1997 Freudenstein Award for significant accomplishments in mechanisms and robotics and the 2004 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation Kawamori Best Paper Award. He is also a Distinguished Lecturer in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society and an elected member of the Robotics and Automation Society Administrative Committee.