Field Robotics Center, Robotics Institute

I am part of the Field Robotics Center at RI. FRC focuses on engineering robotics solutions for hazardous duty on earth and space. Specificially, I am part of the rCommerce Laboratory with Bernardine Dias and Anthony Stentz. The focus of the lab is widespread and is primarily veered towards applications of team coordination in uncertain and dynamic conditions, and in enabling robust, intelligent, and effective coordination of limited resources under these conditions using market-based approaches. An important aspect of this work is to understand and enable effective human-robot teams engaged in complex tasks.

Distributed Intelligence Laboratory

At UT, I was part of Distributed Intelligence Laboratory, at the University of Tennessee and we focus on cooperative robotics and distributed artificial intelligence based issues My research under Dr. Lynne Parker has focused on techniques to improve fault-tolerance for complex multi-robot teams. Other research work include dealing with distributed resource management and fault tolerance for a heterogeneous collection of mobile robots. n one of our projects, we successfully identified the advantages of using swarms of 'dumber' robots over single 'intelligent' robot towards the achievement of a goal. My contribution was to show how a group of 'dumb' robots can be guided by a pair of 'intelligent' robots, in order to reach a desired area in an unknown environment, or what we call "shepherding".