Synthesis for Modular Robots and Swarms

Speaker: Prof. Hadas Kress-Gazit
Affiliation: Cornell University

Abstract: Getting a robot to perform a complex task typically requires a team of engineers who program the robot in a time consuming and error prone process and who validate the resulting robot behavior through testing in different environments. The vision of synthesis for robotics is to bypass the manual programming and testing cycle by enabling users to provide specifications – what the robot should do – and automatically generating the appropriate, and correct, robot control.

In this talk, I will describe the work done in my group towards realizing the synthesis vision. I will focus on recent work that looks at robotics systems that are composed of parts – modular robots and swarms – and the added synthesis challenges that they present.

Biography: Hadas Kress-Gazit is an Associate Professor at the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University. She received her Ph.D. in Electrical and Systems Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 2008 and has been at Cornell since 2009. Her research focuses on formal methods for robotics and automation and more specifically on synthesis for robotics – automatically creating verifiable robot controllers for complex high-level tasks. Her group explores different types of robotic systems including modular robots, soft robots and swarms and synthesizes ideas from different communities such as robotics, formal methods, control, hybrid systems and computational linguistics. Prof. Kress-Gazit received an NSF CAREER award in 2010, a DARPA Young Faculty Award in 2012 and the Fiona Ip Li ’78 and Donald Li ’75 Excellence in teaching award in 2013. She lives in Ithaca with her partner and two kids.

For more information, contact Prof. Ankur Mehta (mehtank@ucla.edu)

Date/Time:
Date(s) - Apr 01, 2019
12:30 pm - 1:30 pm

Location:
EE-IV Shannon Room #54-134
420 Westwood Plaza - 5th Flr., Los Angeles CA 90095