This talk outlines an emerging application area for networked robotic technology, namely, instrumentation for field work in the biological sciences. Drawing from examples in aquatic and terrestrial applications we describe how networked robots can perform automated adaptive sample collection, make observations, and collect data based on varying levels of interaction with the science team. We describe the underlying robotic science and systems challenges which need to be met to achieve these tasks, and report on ongoing efforts to this end. Specifically, we describe algorithms for three problems: statistical network-mediated adaptive sampling using robots, network-mediated robot task allocation, and robotic network topology control. Examples of successful field deployments and the data collected therein will be described. We conclude with a short discussion of the future outlook of this technology.
Biography
Gaurav S. Sukhatme is an Associate Professor of
Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Systems at the University
of Southern California (USC). He received his undergraduate education
at IIT Bombay in Computer Science and Engineering, and MS and PhD
degrees in Computer Science from USC. He is the co-director of the USC
Robotics Research Laboratory and the director of the USC Robotic
Embedded Systems Laboratory which he founded in 2000. His research
interests are in multi-robot systems and sensor/actuator networks. He
has published more than 120 papers in these and related areas. Sukhatme
has served as PI on numerous NSF, DARPA and NASA grants. He is a CoPI
on the NSF Science and Technology Center for Embedded Networked Sensing
(CENS). He is a member of AAAI and ACM, a senior member of IEEE, and a
receipient of the NSF CAREER award. He has served on many
conference program committees, recently co-chairing the program
committee of the first Robotics: Science and Systems conference. He is
the Associate Editor of Autonomous Robots, an Associate Editor of the
IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation and the IEEE Transactions
on Mobile Computing; and a member of the editorial board of IEEE
Pervasive Computing.