Speaker Series: 'Emulating Biological Search Strategies in Robot Swarms' with Dr. Melanie E. Moses
Emulating Biological Search Strategies in Robot Swarms
Natural systems are immensely more adaptive, flexible, and robust than anything built by humans. For example, right now trillions of T cells are crawling through your tissues, without a blueprint of your body or centralized instructions, protecting you from viruses, nascent tumors and their own uncontrolled proliferation. Uncountable numbers of ants crawl across forest canopies, desert sands and perhaps your kitchen counter. Each species uses its own decentralized strategy that tailors a small repertoire of sensing, navigation and communication behaviors to forage effectively in its environment.
While spectacularly successful decentralized collective behaviors have evolved in nature, it remains a challenge to engineer flexible cooperative robotic systems that can function in the real world. We emulate natural search behaviors in robotic swarms that sense, navigate and communicate to search effectively in unmapped environments. We show that provably efficient search algorithms that work well in theory are not necessarily the best algorithms in practice, and that bio-inspired designs can effectively scale to thousands of robots. We implement search algorithms in ground robots designed for NASA to explore for resources and support human settlements on other planets and in UAVs designed to monitor gases emitted in harsh volcanic environments.
Join us on December 6th to discuss this and more, with Dr. Melanie Moses!
About Dr. Moses
Melanie E. Moses is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico and an External Faculty Member at the Santa Fe Institute. She earned a B.S. from Stanford University in Symbolic Systems and a Ph.D. in Biology from UNM.
Her interdisciplinary research crosses the boundaries of Computer Science and Biology through modeling of search processes in complex adaptive systems such as ant colonies and immune systems, and in the bio-inspired design swarms of robots that can autonomously cooperate with each other, scale to large sizes, and adapt to environmental conditions.
She is PI or Co-PI on research funded by NSF, NASA, DARPA, NIH, DOE, Google, Microsoft and the McDonnell Foundation. She has mentored dozens of graduate and undergraduate students and led projects including NM CSforAll, the NASA Swarmathon and the Google ExploreCSR Swarmathon:TNG workshop to engage thousands of women and underrepresented minorities in computer science from high school through graduate school.
