Dmitriy Shutin(Leader, Swarm Exploration Group, Institute for Communications and Navigation; Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt e.V. (DLR), Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany), will give a guest lecture with the title

Swarm Exploration – Algorithms and Applications

A multi-agent robotic system, or a swarm, is an emerging technology, largely inspired by nature. Many animal species tend to group together to maximize foraging areal or counteract predators. A robotic swarm includes multiple unmanned vehicles that can be deployed to increase the effectiveness of a mission due to increased robustness and aperture of the resulting sensing system. Potential applications of swarms include surveillance and tracking, disaster management, as well as extra-terrestrial exploration, to name just a few. This talk addresses data processing aspects relevant to swarm exploration with the main purpose of increasing autonomy of individual agents. Specifically, methods for decentralized parameter estimation given distributed agent measurements will be discussed. Estimated data models are then used to derive uncertainty-driven exploration strategies that guide agents towards more informative sampling locations and thus increase the efficiency of exploration. Applications of these methods to swarm exploration of static as well as dynamic spatial processes will be discussed.