ArtIAMAS Seminar Series
Co-organized by UMBC, UMCP, and Army Research Lab

Risk-Aware Coordination between Aerial and Ground Robots

Pratap Tokekar
Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park

12-1 PM ET, Wed. 2 March 2022 via Webex

As autonomous systems are fielded in unknown, dynamic, potentially contested conditions, they will need to operate with partial, uncertain information. Successful long-term deployments will need agents to reason about their energy logistics and require careful coordination between robots with vastly different energetics (e.g., air and ground platforms), which is especially challenging in the face of uncertainty. To make matters complicated, communication between the agents may not always be available. In this talk, I will present our ongoing ArtIAMAS work on risk-aware route planning and coordination algorithms that can reason about uncertainty in a provable fashion to enable long-term autonomous deployments.

Dr. Pratap Tokekar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and UMIACS at the University of Maryland. Between 2015 and 2019, he was an Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the GRASP lab of the University of Pennsylvania. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota in 2014 and Bachelor of Technology degree in Electronics and Telecommunication from the College of Engineering Pune, India in 2008. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award (2020) and CISE Research Initiation Initiative award (2016). He serves as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, IEEE Transactions of Automation Science & Engineering, and the ICRA and IROS Conference Editorial Board.