MIT talk: Hierarchical Abstractions for Planning & Control of Robotic Swarms

Speaker: Calin Belta, Boston University
Date: Tuesday, February 28 2006
Host: Daniela Rus, MIT

Abstract:
Specifying, planning, and controlling the motion of large groups of mobile agents (swarms) are difficult problems that received a lot of attention in recent years. I will present some recent results on reducing the dimension and complexity of such problems by defining abstractions. First, I will focus on continuous abstractions, which are obtained by extracting a small set of essential features of a swarm that can be used for planning and control. Second, I will show how discrete abstractions can be used to construct a finite dimensional description of the problem. Third, I will present an example in which the above two types of abstractions are seamlessly linked into a hierarchical abstraction framework, in which high level swarm specifications given as temporal logic formulas over features of interest are automatically converted into provably correct robot control laws.