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SUMMARY:From Social Insects to Robots:  Designing with Collective Embodied
  Intelligence
DTSTART:20260909T110000
DTEND:20260909T120000
DTSTAMP:20260917T195103Z
UID:687d711eb50a3b4830386e1fe440ee34e51a4bae6c88e72c57cedd86
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Kirstin Petersen\nNatural swarms exhibit sophisticated colony-
 level behaviors with remarkable scalability and error tolerance. Their evo
 lutionary success stems from more than just intelligent individuals\, it h
 inges on their morphology\, their physical interactions\, and the way they
  shape and leverage their environment. Mound-building termites\, for insta
 nce\, are believed to use their own body as a template for construction\; 
 the resulting dirt mound serves\, among other things\, to regulate volatil
 e pheromone cues which in turn guide further construction and colony growt
 h. Throughout this talk I will argue how we can leverage the same principl
 es to achieve greater performance in robot collectives\, by paying attenti
 on to the interplay between control and hardware\, as well as direct- and 
 environmentally-mediated coordination between robots. I will exemplify the
  strength and challenges of this approach through our studies of social in
 sects\, design of soft and entangled robot collectives\, collective roboti
 c construction crews\, and micro-scale robot swarms.\n\nKirstin Petersen i
 s an Associate Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineer
 ing at Cornell University\, where she is the Aref and Manon Lahham Faculty
  Fellow and a Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability Faculty Fellow. H
 er lab\, the Collective Embodied Intelligence Lab\, is focused on design a
 nd coordination of robot collectives able to achieve complex behaviors bey
 ond the reach of an individual\, and corresponding studies on how social i
 nsects do so in nature. Major research topics include swarm intelligence\,
  embodied intelligence\, soft robots\, bio-hybrid systems\, and robots for
  environmental monitoring and remediation.\nPetersen completed her PhD at 
 Harvard University and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engine
 ering\, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute 
 for Intelligent Systems. Her doctoral research was featured on the cover o
 f Science. She was named one of RoboHub's 25 Women in Robotics You Need to
  Know (2018)\, received a Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering (
 2019)\, the NSF CAREER Award (2021)\, the Cornell College of Engineering E
 xcellence in Research Award (2021)\, the Douglas Whitney '61 Excellence in
  Teaching Award (2022)\, and was elevated to IEEE Senior Member in 2024 an
 d Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability Faculty Fellow in 2025.
LOCATION:ELE 117 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==ELE%20117
STATUS:CANCELLED
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