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SUMMARY:EESS talk on "Effective dynamic environment monitoring with a swar
 m of buoys"
DTSTART:20240312T121500
DTEND:20240312T131500
DTSTAMP:20260407T105806Z
UID:8bdddabc2268cd84e91bb6481315f3a0e466f75f0e85b8d40667ee5e
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Prof. Roland Bouffanais\, Department of Computer Science\, Uni
 versity of Geneva\nAbstract: \nSwarm Robotics offers a promising approach 
 to the pervasive monitoring of marine environments. Traditional monitor
 ing techniques rely on either a single autonomous robot—autonomous surf
 ace vehicle—or a fixed network of sensors. Neither existing technology i
 s suitable or efficacious for the robust monitoring and tracking of dyna
 mic environmental features at the surface of aqueous environments. There
  is a pressing need for small\, low-cost and rapidly deployable autonomous
  buoys. One powerful source of inspiration comes from the process of self-
 organization and swarming\, observed throughout the natural world. We pres
 ent the design\, construction\, and testing of a relatively large swarm of
  buoys. This multi-robot system has been tested with up to 50 units dynami
 cally deployed over large surface areas of an uncontrolled open-water envi
 ronment without any supporting infrastructure. Multi-agent reinforcement l
 earning (MARL) approaches have been considered to optimize the effectivene
 ss of the swarming approach.\n\nBiography:\nRoland Bouffanais is an Associ
 ate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of G
 eneva. His research focuses on interdisciplinary applications at the inter
 sections of complexity\, network science\, control theory\, machine learni
 ng\, and multi-agent systems. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed pape
 rs in leading scientific journals and conference proceedings. He authored
  Design and Control of Swarm Dynamics (2016)—the only full-length book
  on the subject—in Springer’s Complexity Series. He received his Ph.D.
  from EPFL (Lausanne\, Switzerland) in computational science for which he 
 was awarded the prestigious IBM Research Prize in Computational Sciences (
 2008)\, and the ERCOFTAC Da Vinci Award Silver Medal (2007). He was a post
 doctoral fellow and associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  (MIT) and remains a research associate with the Department of Mechanical 
 Engineering at MIT.
LOCATION:GC B1 10 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==GC%20B1%2010 https://epfl.zo
 om.us/j/69011077410
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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