Safety and Resilience in Multi-Agent Systems: Theory and Algorithms for Adversarially-Robust Multi-Robot Teams and Human-Robot Collaboration

Abstract: Planning, decision-making and control for uncertain multi-agent systems has been a popular topic of research with numerous applications, e.g., in robotic networks operating in dynamic, unknown, or even adversarial environments, within or without the presence of humans. Despite significant progress over the years, challenges such as constraints (in terms of state and time specifications), malicious or faulty information, environmental uncertainty and scalability are typically not treated well enough with existing methods. In the first part of this talk, I will present some of our recent results and ongoing work on safety and resilience of multi-agent systems in the presence of adversaries. I will discuss (i) our approach on achieving safe, resilient consensus in the presence of malicious information and its application to resilient leader-follower robot teams under bounded inputs, and (ii) our method on safe multi-agent motion planning and de-confliction using finite-time controllers and estimators in the presence of bounded uncertainty. In the second part of the talk, I will present (iii) our results on human-robot collaboration that involve the unsupervised, on-the-fly learning of assistive information (camera views) by teams of co-robots in human multi-tasking environments.

Bio: Dimitra Panagou received the Diploma and PhD degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, in 2006 and 2012, respectively. Since September 2014 she has been an Assistant Professor with the Department of Aerospace Engineering, University of Michigan. Prior to joining the University of Michigan, she was a postdoctoral research associate with the Coordinated Science Laboratory, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (2012-2014), a visiting research scholar with the GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania (June 2013, fall 2010) and a visiting research scholar with the University of Delaware, Mechanical Engineering Department (spring 2009).

Dr. Panagou's research program emphasizes in the exploration, development, and implementation of control and estimation methods in order to address real-world problems via provably correct solutions. Her research spans the areas of nonlinear systems and control; control of multi-agent systems and networks; distributed systems and control; motion and path planning; switched and hybrid systems; constrained decision-making and control; navigation, guidance, and control of aerospace vehicles. She is particularly interested in the development of provably correct methods for the robustly safe and secure (resilient) operation of autonomous systems in complex missions, with applications in unmanned aerial systems, robot/sensor networks and multi-vehicle systems (ground, marine, aerial, space). Dr. Panagou is a recipient of a NASA Early Career Faculty Award, of an AFOSR Young Investigator Award, and a member of the IEEE and the AIAA. More details: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~dpanagou/research/index.html