🚀 go-pugleaf

I'm on the ECE search committee and two of the candidates being
interviewed are of interest to people in CS. One is speaking today,
and there's a lunch for him in our 8th floor rooms at 12:30 today.

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WHEN: 11:00am
WHERE: Clark Conference Room

Abstract:Controlled Self Assembly and Coordination in Distributed Robotics

Modern embedded and robotic systems are increasingly required to be
completely decentralized: Consisting of thousands or even millions of
independently sensing, computing and actuating elements all operating
in concert in an uncertain environment. To build, for example,
distributed sensor networks, automated factories or autonomous robot
teams, we require tools for analysis, design and synthesis that
address the intertwined problems of communication, computation,
control and complexity.

I this talk I will introduce my research in several areas that
epitomize the decentralized robotics problem: Multi-vehicle
coordination, self-assembling systems and automated manufacturing. In
each area I will discuss ways to synthesize algorithms from task
specifications and analyze their scalability with respect to various
notions of coordination complexity. I will then focus primarily on
self-assembling systems wherein large numbers of parts assemble
themselves in a massively parallel fashion into copies of a
pre-specified product. In particular I will describe algorithms by
which local, decentralized assembly rules can be synthesized from
global product specifications and proved correct.

Bio: Eric Klavins is a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of
Technology in the department of Computer Science and the Department of
Control and Dynamical Systems. He received his Ph.D. in Computer
Science and Engineering in 2001 from the University of Michigan with a
thesis titled "Decentralized Phase Regulation of Cyclic Robotic
Systems". He received his M.S. in Computer Science and Engineering at
the University of Michigan in 1998 and his B.S. in Computer Science at
San Francisco State University in 1996.

Eric Klavins
    Department of Computer Science
    California Institute of Technology
    http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~klavins/