Event Location: 1305 NSH
Bio: Naomi Ehrich Leonard is the Edwin S. Wilsey Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and associated faculty member of the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University where she has been since 1994. Her research is in nonlinear control and dynamics with current interests in cooperative control for multi-agent systems, mobile sensor networks, adaptive ocean sampling, collective behavior in fish schools and decision dynamics in mixed human/robot teams. She became an IEEE Fellow in 2007 and received the Mohammed Dahleh Award (2005), John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2004), Automatica Prize Paper award (1999), ONR Young Investigator Award (1998) and NSF CAREER Award (1995). She received the B.S.E. degree in mechanical engineering from Princeton University in 1985. From 1985 to 1989, she worked as an engineer in the electric power industry. She received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland in 1991 and 1994.

Abstract: Networks of robotic vehicles that move, sense and respond as a collective have the potential to perform challenging tasks in complex environments, much like schools of fish and flocks of birds behave in remarkable, self-sustaining ways despite uncertain, changing conditions. In this talk I will describe collaborative research on coordinated motion control of multi-robot systems for cooperative sensing and exploration. This includes development of systematic methodology for the vehicle network to track features and to provide efficient sampling coverage of regions with possibly time-varying, spatially distributed fields. The effort is tightly connected to modeling of fish schooling to uncover mechanisms that yield efficient and robust collective behavior. I will illustrate with application to design of an adaptive ocean sampling network and present results from field experiments in Monterey Bay, California.