Event Location: NSH 1305
Bio: Dr. Wei-Min Shen is the Director of Polymorphic Robotics Laboratory, an Associate Director of the Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems, and a Research Associate Professor in Computer Science at University of Southern California. He received his Ph.D. under Nobel Laureate Professor Herbert A. Simon from Carnegie Mellon University in 1989. Dr. Shen’s current research interests include self-reconfigurable and metamorphic systems, autonomous robots, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Life Science, and he has over 120 publications in these areas. He is the recipient of a Silver-Medal Award in 1996 AAAI Robotics Competition, a World Championship Award in 1997 Middle-sized RoboCup Competition, a Meritorious Service Award at ISI in 1997, a Phi Kappa Phi Faculty Recognition Award at USC in 2003, a Championship Award at the first ICRA planetary contingency robotic competition in 2008, and a Best Paper Award at the 26th Arm Science Conference in 2008. His research activities have been reported by scientific journals such as SCIENCE (9/26/1997 and 8/8/2003) and NATURE (5/28/2004), media press such as CNN, PBS, BBC, Fox, Discovery, and national and international newspapers and magazines such as New York Times, LATime, and others.

Abstract: Self-reconfigurable modular robots are metamorphic systems that can autonomously change their logical or physical configurations (such as shapes, sizes, or formations), as well as their locomotion and manipulation, based on the mission and the environment in hand. Because of their modularity, versatility, self-healing ability and low cost reproducibility, such robots provide a flexible approach for achieving complex tasks in unstructured and dynamic environments. The construction and control of these robots, however, are very challenging due to the dynamic topology of the module network, the limited resource of individual modules, the difficulties in global synchronization, the preclusion of centralized decision makers, and the unreliability of communication among modules. This talk presents the SuperBot reconfigurable robotic system and a distributed and reliable control architecture and algorithms for such robots. The approach is inspired by the biological concept of hormones (thus the name “digital hormones”) and it provides a unified solution for metamorphic systems’ self-reconfiguration/assembly, locomotion, and manipulation. Modules are modeled as autonomous agents free from globally unique identifiers and they can physically connect and disconnect with each other and can communicate via content-based messages. In particular, the talk will present (1) SuperBot’s multifunctional capability for locomotion, (2) a general
representation for self-reconfigurable systems; (3) distributed solutions for “task negotiation,” “topology-dependent behavior selection” and “synchronization”; (4) distributed detection and reaction mechanisms for topology changes and message loss; and (5) demonstrations of unique, online, self-reconfiguration capabilities of SuperBot for assembly, bifurcation, unification, behavior shifting, and shape-alternations.