Towards Safe and Resilient Autonomy in Multi-Robot Systems

Abstract

In the near future, autonomous systems such as multi-robot systems are envisioned to increasingly co-exist with humans in our daily lives, from household service to large-scale warehouse logistics, agriculture environment sampling, and smart city. In these applications, robots and humans as networked heterogeneous components will frequently interact with each other in a variety of scenarios under uncertain, rapidly-changing, and possibly hostile environment. On one hand, harmonious interactions among robots, as well as between robots and humans, would require safe integration (e.g. collision-free close-proximity interactions) of heterogeneous robots, human, and human-robot autonomy. On the other hand, reliable interactions among autonomous multi-robot systems often call for resilient system integrity (e.g. communication capability with potential robot failures) to retain its capability of accomplishing complex tasks through coordinated behaviors. In the proposed talk, I will discuss our recent works towards safe autonomy and resilient autonomy that aim to facilitate correct-by-design robotic behaviors in a variety of applications.