Events Detail

Speaker:
Dr. Roderich Gross, Senior Lecturer in Robotics and Computational Intelligence, University of Sheffield, UK

Robots, Swarms, and Turing Learning
Dr. Roderich Gross, Senior Lecturer in Robotics and Computational Intelligence, University of Sheffield, UK

In this talk, I will examine the behavior of autonomous agents, with particular emphasis on systems comprising of numerous embodied agents (e.g., swarms of robots). First, I consider the problem of designing behavioral rules for robots of extreme simplicity. We show among others how "computation-free" robots, with only 1 bit or trit of sensory information, can accomplish tasks such as multi-agent rendezvous, cooperative object manipulation and collective choice. Second, I consider the problem of inferring the behavioral rules or morphology of robots. I use Turing Learning - a generalization of Generative Adversarial Networks. In Turing Learning, the discriminators are allowed to "interrogate", similar to their human counterparts in the Turing test. I present two case studies where this active learning approach helps improve model accuracy, and discuss applications to robotics and beyond.

Roderich Gross is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering at the University of Sheffield. He received a Ph.D. degree in engineering science in 2007 from Université libre de Bruxelles in 2007, and was a JSPS Fellow (Tokyo Institute of Technology) and a Marie Curie Fellow (EPFL & Unilever). He has authored more than 70 publications in robotics and artificial intelligence. He has made contributions to the coordination of swarm and reconfigurable robots, and invented a machine learning method called Turing Learning. Dr Gross serves as the General Chair of DARS 2016, Editor of IROS 2015-18, and as an Associate Editor of Swarm Intelligence, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, and IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine.