Thursday, March 29, Volen 101, 2:00 p.m.
Social insects build large, complex structures, which emerge through the collective actions of many simple agents acting with no centralized control or preplanning. This swarm approach to construction has a number of desirable features, such as considerable parallelism and robustness to component loss. However, designing local agent behaviors to achieve a desired global result is in general a serious challenge. In this talk, I will describe the design and implementation of a system in which autonomous mobile robots collectively build user-specified structures from square building blocks. Robots act without explicit communication or cooperation, instead using the partially completed structure to coordinate their actions. Increasing the capabilities of the building material (rather than of the robots) -- for instance, allowing blocks to store or communicate information -- can be a simple and effective way to improve system performance. Robust, decentralized algorithms let the system provably and reliably build arbitrary desired structures, using only a high-level design as input.
Speaker bio: Justin Werfel is a postdoctoral fellow in Harvard University's department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science. He received his Ph.D. from MIT in 2006. His research includes work in swarm engineering, reinforcement learning, and evolutionary theory.
Host: Jordan Pollack