MechE PhD Final Oral Defense: Brennan Brodt

TITLE: ALGORITHMIC REASONING FOR MULTI-AGENT SYSTEMS WITH LIMITED INFORMATION

ABSTRACT: Multi-agent autonomous systems are becoming more prevalent than ever before, in warehouses and factories, on public roadways and sidewalks, for infrastructure inspection and ecological monitoring; The ability for autonomous agents to understand their surroundings, coordinate effectively, and navigate safely while completing their team objectives is paramount to successful operations. In well controlled environments, information, communication, and coordination are abundant, however, in real world deployments, these conveniences are few and far between. This thesis explores a variety of topics that enhance the autonomy of individual and multi-agent systems through algorithmic reasoning. In this work, we present a variety of systematic methods to improve spatial awareness, high-level coordination, and safe operation through intuitive policies built from multi-objective optimization, environmental decomposition, and efficient graph algorithms. First, we explore how multi-objective optimization can be used to adaptively plan in highly dynamic and dangerous environments purely from local observations. Second, we investigate methods for generating Free-Space Ellipsoid Graphs in unknown and complex, non-convex environments from minimal and realistic sensor readings, which are used to encode spatial information in a discrete representation for the coordination of multiple heterogeneous agents. Finally, we build on our foundations of multi-objective optimization and network theory to develop minimally invasive observers that can extract a great deal of information from team operations. With these models, we investigate both how we can maintain team level privacy to protect sensitive objective information and how understanding team behaviors can be used to improve the coexistence between agents operating in shared and public environments.

COMMITTEE: ADVISOR Professor Alyssa Pierson, ME/SE; CHAIR Professor Sheila Russo, ME/MSE; Professor Andrew Sabelhaus, ME/SE; Professor Sean Andersson, ME/SE; Professor Roberto Tron, ME/SE