ENTEG seminar series: Dr. Bahar Haghighat

Miniaturized Robotic Swarms for Sensing and Inspection Applications

Abstract: Over the past two decades, the field of swarm robotics has been very successful at developing ground, aerial, and aquatic robotic swarms that demonstrate a variety of collective behaviors. A main challenge that remains unmet, however, is deployment of robot swarms to deliver applications in uncontrolled real-world settings. Sensing, surveying, and inspection applications will largely benefit from deployment of robot swarms. Swarms of miniaturized robots will enable accessing environments that are beyond the reach of typical platforms, realizing extensive networks of mobile sensors. My research strives to develop: (i) swarms of miniaturized robotic modules for sensing, surveying and inspection applications, addressing challenges in their power, sensing, communication, actuation, and locomotion means, and (ii) control algorithms for coordinating the swarm along with comprehensive modeling frameworks at multiple abstraction levels that accurately capture the physics of the individual robots and their interactions with the environment (i.e., low-abstraction models) as well as the behavior and the performance of the robot swarm (i.e., high-abstraction models). In this talk, I will present a summary of my previous research efforts and an overview of my future projects towards achieving the vision described above.