Dr. Manuela Veloso
Autonomous Multi-Robot Teams
Wednesday March 13, 2002
Building 8 Auditorium - 3:30 PM
(Refreshments at 3:00 PM)

Dr. Manuela Veloso, will talk about Autonomous Multi-Robot Teams. Her long-term research passion is the study of complete autonomous intelligent agents that can continuously perceive the world, act, achieve goals in dynamic and uncertain environments, and learn to improve their performance. Creating such effective agents, in particular as members of a team in the presence of opponents, is a challenging problem. Robotic soccer has offered an interesting concrete environment for research in multi-agent planning, execution, and learning. Dr. Veloso, with her students, has been pursuing research in robotic soccer in three different technical setups: fully distributed multi-agent simulation, small wheeled robots with centralized perception, and fully autonomous Sony legged robots. They have participated in the RoboCup international competitions since 1997 and have been champions several times.  In this talk, she will give an overview of their work in the different leagues. She will also discuss some of their underlying main research contributions, including a robust perception-biased probabilistic localization algorithm, a real-time path planning and replanning algorithm, and a variable learning rate multi-agent learning algorithm. She will set her research goals in perspective and discuss some of the fascinating open questions to be addressed towards truly creating teams of autonomous robots. The talk will be illustrated with video clips from RoboCup games.

Dr. Manuela Veloso is Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department and the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1992. A native of Portugal, she received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering in 1980 and a M.Sc. in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1984 from the Instituto Superior Tecnico in Lisbon. Dr. Veloso researches in the area of artificial intelligence. Her long-term research goal is the effective construction of intelligent agents where cognition, perception, and action are combined to autonomously address planning, execution, and learning tasks. She has developed robotic soccer teams that have participated in the RoboCup international competitions in three different categories, namely simulation software agents, small-wheeled robots, and Sony four-legged robots.  Dr. Veloso received an NSF Career Award in 1995 and the Allen Newell Medal for Excellence in Research in 1997. She is the author of one book on Planning by Analogical Reasoning, editor of several other books, and the author of over 100 technical journal and conference papers.  Dr. Veloso is the Vice-President of the RoboCup International Federation and was the General Chair for RoboCup-2001, held in Seattle, August 2001. More details are available at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mmv/

IS&T Colloquium Committee Host: John Schnase
jschnase@pop900.gsfc.nasa.gov