Robots are physical artifacts with a seamless integration of perception, cognition, and action. I will focused on teamwork for teams of intelligent autonomous robots performing tasks in highly uncertain domains. Robots need to jointly assess the state of their environment, communicate with each other, make decisions, execute actions towards the achievement of team objectives, and learn from observation and feedback based on the outcome of their actions. I will present algorithms for a team of robots to effectively select team strategies in the presence of a dynamic environment. Finally, I will introduce the concept of "when-needed teamwork," and briefly present an algorithm to learn to coordinate.

Manuela M. Veloso is Herbert A. Simon Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. She earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon. She holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and an M.Sc. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Instituto Superior Tecnico in Lisbon, Portugal. Veloso researches in planning, control learning, and execution for multi-robot teams. Her algorithms address uncertain, dynamic, and adversarial environments. With her students, Veloso has developed teams of robot soccer agents, which have been RoboCup world champions several times. Veloso is a Fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence and President of the International RoboCup Federation. She was awarded an NSF Career Award and the Allen Newell Medal for Excellence in Research. Veloso is the author of one book Planning by Analogical Reasoning and editor of several other books. She has also published over 200 journal articles and conference papers. Her website is http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mmv.

Prof. Veloso's visit is hosted by Douglas Downey