How can many robots work together effectively to collect information from the environment? This is a question Victoria Edwards, a fifth-year doctoral student in MEAM, is working to solve.
Drawing on complex systems theory, her work focuses on developing algorithms that instruct each robot to answer two questions:
(1) What task should it do next?
(2) And at what time should it do that next task?
In this video, Edwards shares insights from real-world deployments, including experiments in the Schuylkill River, and discusses the future potential of robot teams in industries such as agriculture, wind energy development, and ocean monitoring. “All of those challenges are something that we’re going to have to face in the next 25 to 50 years,” says Edwards. “And I think robots are going to be a tool that can at least provide us some situational awareness for what those changes might look like.”
Edwards works in the Scalable Autonomous Robots (ScalAR) Lab with M. Ani Hsieh, Associate Professor in MEAM and Deputy Director of the GRASP Lab.
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