Speaker: Prof. Sandor Fekete, Department of Computer Science, TU Braunschweig

Title: Cooperative Navigation for Robot Swarms

Abstract:  In recent years, the field of robotics has achieved progress
by increasing the capabilities of individual robots. This has produced
good results, but keeps the cost of state-of-art machines relatively
high. An alternative approach is to develop simpler, cheaper (and,
with additional challenges and possibilities: smaller) platforms in
large numbers, at the expense of reducing the capabilities per
robot. The latter raises new challenges for the development of new
principles and algorithms, such as coordinating many cheap robots with
limited capabilities into a swarm that can carry out difficult tasks,
such as exploration, surveillance, and guidance. In this talk, we show
a number of recent results, many of which are based on a collaboration
between theory and practice of swarm robotics. We consider online
problems related to exploring and surveying a region by a swarm of
robots with limited communication range.

Speaker Bio: Sandor Fekete studied mathematics and physics at the University
of Cologne (Germany), before getting his Ph.D. in Combinatorics and
Optimization from the University of Waterloo, Canada (1992). After
spending a year as postdoc at SUNY Stony Brook, he returned to
Cologne, where he got his habilation in mathematics (1998) and joined
the optimization group at TU Berlin. In 2001 he became a professor of
mathematics at TU Braunschweig; since 2007 he holds a newly founded
chair for algorithmics in the Computer Science Department in
Braunschweig. Since 2011, he has been Director of the TU Braunschweig
Center for Informatics and Information Technology (tubs.CITY). Sandor
has published about 200 papers with about 200 different coauthors; his
interests range all the way from theoretical foundations of algorithms
and optimization to applications areas such as practical computer
science, electrical engineering, economics, biology and physics.