"Self-Reconfigurable Robots and Digital Hormones for Multifunctional Applications"

1/28/05: 10:30 AM
11th Floor Large Conference Room
Host: Patrick Pantel, schedule

Abstract: Self-reconfigurable modular robots are metamorphic systems that can autonomously change their logical or physical configurations (such as shapes, sizes or formations), as well as their locomotion and manipulation, based on the mission and the environment in hand. Because of their modularity, versatility, self-healing ability and low cost reproducibility, such robots provide a flexible approach for achieving complex tasks in unstructured and dynamic environments. They are well suited for applications such as search and rescue, reconnaissance, self-assembly, inspections in hazardous environments, and exploration in space and ocean. The construction and control of these robots, however, are very challenging due to the dynamic topology of the module network, the limited resource of individual modules, the difficulties in global synchronization, the preclusion of centralized decision makers, and the unreliability of communication among modules. This talk presents the recent progress in our lab for these challenging tasks and their applications for affordable and sustainable space missions in the near future. We will present the hormone-inspired distributed control architecture and algorithms (US-patented), demonstrate with movies for the ability of plug-and-play and arbitrarily reshuffling modules (body-parts) in systems, discuss our theoretical development for self-reconfigurable systems in general, analyze the hardware/software challenges we face to make these robots for real-world multifunctional applications, and outline our current solutions for these challenging tasks. The talk will be interactive and feedback and discussions are most welcome.

About Wei-Min Shen: Dr. Wei-Min Shen is the director of Polymorphic Robotics Laboratory (http://www.isi.edu/robots) at USC/Information Sciences Institute (ISI), and has over 22 years of experience in research. Dr. Wei-Min Shen is also an Associate Director at the Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems, and a Research Assistant Professor in Computer Science at University of Southern California (USC). He received his Ph.D. under Nobel Laureate Professort Herbert A. Simon from Carnegie Mellon University in 1989, and had extensive training in machine learning and machine discovery. His unique approach to machine learning is published as a 360-page book on surprise-based learning (Shen94), with a remarkable foreword written by herbert Simon. His current research interests include self-reconfigurable and metamorphic systems, autonomous robots, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Life Science. He has about 100 publications in these areas. he is the recipient of a Silver-Medal Award in 1996 AAAI Robotics Competition, a World Championship Award in 1997 Middle-sized RoboCup Competition, a Meritorious Service Award at ISI in 1997, and a Phi Kappa Phi Faculty Recognition Award at USC in 2003. He is the author of the book "Autonomous Learning from the Environment" published by W.H. Freeman in 1994, and the inventor of homone-inspired distributed and decentralized control for self-reconfigurable systems (US Patent #006636781). He has served as chairs and committee members for international conferences and workshops in Robotics, Machine Learning, and Data Mining, and as editorial board members for scientific books and research journals. His research activities have been reported by leading scientific journals such as SCIENCE (9/26/1997 and 8/8/2003) and NATURE (5/28/2004), and media press such as CNN, PBS, Discovery, and other newspapers and magazines in the world. His research has been supported by NSF, AFOSR, DARPA, and NASA. He is on the Editorial Board for the journal of Intelligence Data Analysis, and a special editor for self-reconfigurable robots for IEEE Transactions on Mechatronics. He has reviewed papers for Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Robots, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, IEEE Trans. on Data and Knowledge Engineering, IEEE Trans. on Robotics, IEEE Trans. on Mechatronics, Machine Learning, Decisions Support Systems, and Distributed and Parallel Databases. Book editor for Learning Action Models (AAAI Press). Handbook of Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (Cambridge University Press). Conference Chair for the 7th International Conference on Autonomous Intelligent Systems. Program committee member for National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Agents Conference, the International Conference of Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

Last updated: Mon Jun 19 17:44:06 2006