ICON Panel: Intelligent Robotic Swarms: Current Capabilities and a Vision for the Future

This panel, featuring Prof. Spring Berman (Arizona State University), Dr. Erin Cherry (Northrop Grumman Corp.), Dr. Timothy Chung (DARPA), Prof. Shaoshuai Mou (Purdue), and Dr. Brian Sadler (Army Research Lab), and moderated by Prof. Shreyas Sundaram, will provide an overview of ongoing research into robotic swarms, along with a discussion of critical challenges and a vision for the future.

Zoom link: https://purdue-edu.zoom.us/j/99124238554

Panelists

Prof. Spring Berman is an Associate Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Arizona State University (ASU), where she directs the Autonomous Collective Systems Laboratory and is Associate Director of the Center for Human, Artificial Intelligence, and Robot Teaming (CHART). Before joining ASU, she was a postdoc in Computer Science at Harvard University, and she received a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include the design of control strategies for robotic swarms and other types of distributed systems. She is a recipient of the 2016 ONR Young Investigator Award and the 2014 DARPA Young Faculty Award.

Dr. Erin Cherry is a Program Manager in Emerging Capabilities Development within the Advanced Intelligent Systems organization at Northrop Grumman. She leads a portfolio of programs focused on swarming with attritable platforms, human-machine teaming, and adaptive command and control. Cherry joined Northrop Grumman in 2014 and previously supported a user experience team. Cherry has a Doctoral degree in Information Systems focusing on Human-Computer Interaction from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Dr. Timothy Chung joined DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office as a program manager in February 2016. He serves as the Program Manager for the OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics Program and the DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge. His interests include autonomous/unmanned air vehicles, collaborative autonomy for unmanned swarm system capabilities, distributed perception, distributed decision-making, and counter unmanned system technologies.
Prior to joining DARPA, Dr. Chung served as an Assistant Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School and Director of the Advanced Robotic Systems Engineering Laboratory (ARSENL). His academic interests included modeling, analysis, and systems engineering of operational settings involving unmanned systems, combining collaborative autonomy development efforts with an extensive live-fly field experimentation program for swarm and counter-swarm unmanned system tactics and associated technologies. Dr. Chung also served as Deputy Director of the Secretary of the Navy initiative for the Consortium for Robotics and Unmanned Systems Education and Research (CRUSER). Dr. Chung holds a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Cornell University. He also earned Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology.

Prof. Shaoshuai Mou is an Assistant Professor in the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Purdue University, where he directs the Autonomous and Intelligent Multi-agent Systems (AIMS) Lab and also a co-director of Center for Innovation in Control, Optimization and Networks (ICON). Before joining Purdue, he received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at Yale University in 2014 and worked as a postdoc researcher at MIT for a year after that. His research interests include multi-agent autonomy and learning, distributed algorithms for control and optimization, human-machine teaming, resilience & cybersecurity, and also experimental research involving autonomous air and ground vehicles.

Panel video: