The last few years have seen significant progress in our understanding of how one should structure multi-robot systems. New control, coordination, and communication strategies have emerged and in this talk, we summarize some of these developments. In particular, we will discuss how to go from local rules to global behaviors in a systematic manner in order to achieve distributed geometric objectives, such as achieving and maintaining formations, area coverage, and swarming behaviors. We will also investigate how users can interact with networks of mobile robots in order to inject new information and objectives. The efficacy of these interactions depends directly on the interaction dynamics and the structure of the underlying information-exchange network. We will relate these network-level characteristics to controllability and manipulability notions in order to produce effective human-swarm interaction strategies.

Magnus Egerstedt is the Schlumberger Professor and Associate Chair for Research and External Affairs in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received the M.S. degree in Engineering Physics and the Ph.D. degree in Applied Mathematics from the Royal Institute of Technology in 1996 and 2000 respectively, and he received a B.A. degree in Philosophy from Stockholm University in 1996. Dr. Egerstedt’s research interests include hybrid and networked control, with applications in motion planning, control, and coordination of mobile robots. Magnus Egerstedt is a Fellow of the IEEE, serves as Editor for Electronic Publications for the IEEE Control Systems Society, and is the director of the Georgia Robotics and Intelligent Systems Lab. He received the ECE/GT Outstanding Junior Faculty Member Award in 2005, and the CAREER award from the U.S. National Science Foundation in 2003.