REUSABLE TEAMWORK FOR MULTI-ROBOT TEAMS

GAL KAMINKA

Bar Ilan University

For many years, multi-robot researchers have focused on specific
application-inspired basic tasks (e.g., coverage, moving in formation,
foraging, patrolling) as a way of studying cooperation between robots.
But users want to see increasingly complex missions being tackled,
which challenge this methodology: first, some missions cannot be
easily decomposed into the familiar basic tasks, making previous
knowledge non-reusable; second, the target operating environments
challenge the typically sterile settings assumed in many previous
works (such challenges include adversaries, multiple concurrent goals,
human operators and users, and more).

In this talk, I will argue that the reusable components in complex
missions are often found not in the tasks, but in the interactions
between robots; that is, while taskwork varies significantly, teamwork
is largely generic. And while many multi-robot researchers have begun
exploring generic task-allocation methods, I will report on my group's
work over the last decade, identifying and developing other general
mechanisms for teamwork, and integrating them at the architecture
level to facilitate development of robust teams at reduced programming
effort. I will sample some of our results in developing robots for
missions ranging from robust formation maintenance, through
patrolling, to soccer and urban search-and-rescue.

BIO

Gal A. Kaminka is an associate professor in the Computer Science
Department and the Brain Sciences Research Center at Bar Ilan
University (Israel). His research expertise includes multi-agent and
multi-robot systems, teamwork and coordination, behavior and plan
recognition, and modeling social behavior. He received his Ph.D. from
the University of Southern California (2000), and spent two years as a
post-doctorate fellow at Carnegie Mellon. Today, Prof. Kaminka leads
the MAVERICK research group at Bar Ilan University, supervising over a
dozen M.Sc. and Ph.D. students. He was awarded an IBM faculty award
and top places at international robotics competitions. He served as
the program chair of the 2008 Israeli Conference on Robotics, and the
program co-chair of the 2010 International Joint Conference on
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS). He has served on
the international executive bodies of the International Foundation of
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (IFAAMAS) and the
Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).
Currently, he is spending his sabbatical as a Radcliffe Fellow at
Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.