CISE Seminar: Xi Yu, West Virginia University

Date: Oct 7, 2022
Time: 3:00PM-4:00PM

Xi Yu,
Assistant Professor
West Virginia University

Stochastic Time-varying Networks Synthesized by Robots in Dynamic Environments

Autonomous technologies are urgently needed for tasks that occur in dynamic environments and require autonomous solutions that can operate for long durations in a persistent fashion. As tasks become more complex, teams of robots can work more efficiently and add new capabilities through cooperation, coordination, and collaboration across individuals. Individual robots in a multi-robot team not only interact with the environment but also with each other which enables them to jointly synthesize collective solution strategies which, ideally, are robust, resilient, and secure. Real-world networks synthesized by connections across individuals are almost unavoidable to be problematic, usually due to a lack of environmental consistency, accessibility, and structure. Robots can leverage their mobility to regenerate connections while existing ones fail, synthesizing time-varying networks with links that emerge and disappear over time. The dynamics in the environments may cause irregular robot movements and wireless attenuations, therefore introducing randomness in the synthesis, the timing, and the connection quality of the temporal links. Such stochastic networks are beyond the scope of current graph theory and random graph theory tools. This talk introduces the synthesis of a time-varying network by robots deployed in a semi-structured dynamic environment, and the control and mitigation methods designed for the uncertainty carried in stochastic time-varying networks.

Xi Yu is an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at West Virginia University. Before joining WVU in January 2021, she was a postdoctoral associate at the GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. She received a B.S. and a Dipl.-Ing. in mechanical engineering from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in 2010 and 2011, respectively. She then worked as a research intern at the Institute of Product Engineering at KIT. She received a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Boston University in 2018. Xi’s main research interests include exploring challenging environments (i.e. large-scale environments with intrinsic dynamics, uncertainties, or adversaries) with teams of robots that are minimally actuated, or with limited sensing or communication capabilities, and to forward the understanding of the time-varying, stochastic networks synthesized by the robot teams.

Faculty Host: Sean Andersson
Student Host: Zili Wang