The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

Cooperative Multi-Agent teams can be deployed in many interesting and important domains such as industry, transportation, agriculture, security and more. In this talk, I will introduce key results from my research, primarily focusing on theoretical work concerned with search for smart agents by UAV teams. Suppose that in a given planar circular region, there are some smart mobile agents, and we would like to find them using teams of sweeping agents. A smart agent is an agent capable of detecting and responding to the motions of searchers by performing evasive maneuvers, to avoid detection. We assume various search configurations for the sweeping team of agents, and present guaranteed search techniques for single agent and multi agent teams. These search procedures enable both confinement of the smart agents to their original domain as well as complete detection of all of them by searching the entire expanding domain. Furthermore, we investigate the dual problem of devising guaranteed defense policies for protecting a given region from the entrance of smart mobile agents by detecting them using a team of sweeping agents. The desired outcome of the developed protocols is a defense strategy of the original domain and for its expansion.

Afterwards, I will briefly discuss two other avenues of research I am investigating. The first is a biodynamical analysis of locust trajectories towards the purpose of understanding and modeling movements of locust swarms. The objective of this research is to assist in developing bio-inspired robotic technology by learning from insect modes of locomotion and enabling the biological and robotics communities to collaboratively work toward bio-inspired locomotion. The second is concerned with developing algorithms for intelligent transportation systems aimed at enabling provably safe and efficient management and routing of large numbers of aerial vehicles for Urban Air Mobility applications.