Abstract: In this talk I will describe how formal methods such as synthesis – automatically creating a system from a formal specification – can be leveraged to design robots, explain and provide guarantees for their behavior, and even identify skills they might be missing. I will discuss the benefits and challenges of synthesis techniques and will give examples of different robotic systems including modular robots, swarms and robots interacting with people.

Brief Bio: 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 (pun intended) ideas from different communities such as robotics, formal methods, control, hybrid systems and computational linguistics. She received an NSF CAREER award in 2010, a DARPA Young Faculty Award in 2012, the Fiona Ip Li ’78 and Donald Li ’75 Excellence in teaching award in 2013, the senior faculty champion award in 2019, and the Kenneth A. Goldman ’71 Teaching Award in 2019. She lives in Ithaca with her partner and two kids.

Host: Aaron Steinfeld

For Appointments: Stephanie Matvey (smatvey@andrew.cmu.edu)