Tuesday, May 26th 2015, 8:30AM - 12:00PM, Seattle, WA USA

ROOM CHANGE! Room WSCC 618/619, Washington State Convention Center

Overview and Content

Interconnected robotic systems have become the focus of intense investigation, primarily due to the promise of adaptability and scalability compared to single-robot solutions. However, the study of interconnected systems is remarkably complex and susceptible to fragmentation due to the diverse research communities involved. Both a high level view of the fundamental topics that drive interconnected systems, and a fine-grained understanding of each topic is required to make progress in the field, and to provide an accessible starting point to new research. To this end, we have initiated a series of workshops, each addressing topics that underlie crucial, and yet common, aspects of theory and application in multi-robot systems. This workshop, the second in the series, focuses on asymmetry in multi-robot systems. While symmetry can alleviate analytical issues and allow for sound theoretical conclusions, symmetric models can be poor representations of reality, where asymmetries for example in communication, mobility, and sensing are often present. This workshop therefore highlights the asymmetric necessities of multi-robot theory and application, with the goal of moving towards realistic collaborative systems. More broadly, this workshop features contributions on the lack of equivalence among components of interconnected systems, the inherent difficulties, and the novel solutions that arise.

As our long-term vision for the series is to truly connect workshop topics, we will incorporate notions of asymmetry in topological control methodologies, to relate to the previous IROS workshop. Finally, we aim to build the series across the robotics and control communities, hopefully establishing a bridge between novelties in multi-agent theory and the future requirements of multi-robot applications.

This workshop is sponsored by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society’s Technical Committee on Multi-Robot Systems.

Intended Audience

The goal of this workshop will be to gather researchers in the field of robotics, with particular interest in the implications of asymmetry in distributed robotics, with expertise ranging from network theory and control, to robotic interaction and design. We also hope to connect researchers in academia, government, and industry, with interest in continuing the journey towards methodically constructing a taxonomy of interconnected systems.

Organizers



Ryan K. Williams

Electrical Engineering
University of Southern California
http://robotics.usc.edu/~rkwillia
ryan.k.willia@gmail.com

Andrea Gasparri

Dipartimento di Ingegneria
Università degli studi "Roma Tre"
http://gasparri.dia.uniroma3.it
gasparri@dia.uniroma3.it

Gaurav S. Sukhatme

Computer Science
University of Southern California
http://robotics.usc.edu/~gaurav
gaurav@usc.edu