Scientific Colloquium
May 9, 2018, 3:30 p.m.
Building 3, Goett Auditorium
KIRSTIN
PETERSEN
CORNELL UNIVERSITY
"Designing
Robot Collectives"
In robot collectives, interactions between large numbers of
individually simple robots lead to complex global behaviors. A
great source of inspiration is social insects such as termites
and bees, where thousands of individuals coordinate to handle
advanced tasks like food supply and nest construction in a
remarkably scalable and error tolerant manner. Likewise, robot
swarms have the ability to address tasks beyond the reach of
single robots, and promise more efficient parallel operation and
greater robustness due to redundancy. Key challenges involve
both control, coordination and physical implementation. I will
discuss an approach to such systems relying on embodied
intelligent robot collectives designed as an integral part of
their environment. In this context I will discuss past and
ongoing work on termite-inspired robotic construction of
user-specified three-dimensional structures, work to enable
cost-efficient, yet capable, soft robot collectives, and
on-going work on robust bio-cyber physical systems based on
swarms of honey bees.
About the Speaker:
Kirstin Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell
University; with field positions in Mechanical Engineering and
Computer Science. Her lab, the Collective Embodied Intelligence
Lab, is focused on design and coordination of large robot
collectives able to achieve complex behaviors beyond the reach
of an individual, and corresponding studies on how social
insects do so in nature. Major research topics include swarm
intelligence, embodied intelligence, and bio-hybrid systems.
Before arriving at Cornell, Petersen did a postdoc with the
Physical Intelligence Department at the Max Planck Institute for
Intelligent Systems in Germany. She completed a Ph.D in 2014 in
computer science at Harvard University and the Wyss Institute
for Biologically Inspired Engineering. Her graduate work was
featured in and on the cover of Science in February 2014, and
was elected among the top ten scientific breakthroughs of 2014.
Kirstin completed her M.Sc. in modern artificial intelligence in
2008 and a B.Sc. in electro-technical engineering in 2005, both
with the University of Southern Denmark.
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