Abstract

Interest in autonomous multi-agent systems has heated up in the applied research community, with many institutions investing to understand how to apply cooperative robot teams and to develop the technologies needed for real-world systems. This talk will provide an overview of multi-robot technology development activities at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). First, the talk will briefly share a vision for potential NASA multi-agent missions, such as spacecraft constellations, networked planetary observers, and orbiting distributed apertures. Second, it will provide a survey of the research projects that aim to support this vision.

Biography

Dr. Michael Wolf is a robotics researcher and the supervisor of the Maritime & Multi-Agent Autonomy group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He is the principal investigator for numerous autonomous vehicle projects for NASA and defense agencies, with an emphasis on technology development for multi-robot coordination and uncrewed sea surface vehicles. Dr. Wolf has a BS from Stanford University and an MS and PhD from Caltech, all in Mechanical Engineering. His research interests include multi-agent systems, multi-target tracking, autonomy software architectures, sensor fusion, motion planning, and natural human–robot interfaces.