[Colloq] Security and Communication for Multi-Robot Systems through Coordinated Control, Stephanie Gil, Tuesday, November 20th , 1:45pm, ISEC Auditorium

[Ponte, Christopher]

Title: Security and Communication for Multi-Robot Systems through Coordinated Control

Speaker: Stephanie Gil

When: Tuesday, November 20th , 1:45pm, ISEC Auditorium
Abstract: Robust information exchange and trusted coordination are both critical needs for multi-robot systems acting in the real world. While these needs are universal across platforms, the computing and sensing resources of these platforms are not – making effective coordination difficult to enable, to scale, and to secure. This talk will present new methods of security and adaptive network formation for resource-constrained, mobile multi-robot systems (applications include delivery drones, mobile IoT, and robotic vehicles).  The focus of this work is at the intersection of robotics and communication, and in particular, ways that communication technologies can be used to make resource-constrained multi-robot systems more capable.  We will present our developed technologies in 1) position control algorithms for multiple robots to achieve high data rate networks and 2) development of a virtual sensor for bi-directional Synthetic Aperture Radar between two communicating agents.  Building upon these technologies, we develop a theoretical and experimental framework for provably thwarting spoofing attacks using communicated wireless signals in various important multi-agent tasks such as consensus, coverage, and drone delivery.  This talk will have a particular focus on our most recent results in securing multi-agent consensus.
Bio: Stephanie is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering at Arizona State University (Jan 2018).  Prior, she was a research scientist in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) at MIT where she also completed her Ph.D. work (2014) on multi-robot coordination and control and M.S. work (2009) on system identification and model learning. At MIT she collaborated extensively with the wireless communications group NetMIT, the result of which were two U.S. patents recently awarded in adaptive heterogeneous networks for multi-robot systems and accurate indoor positioning using Wi-Fi.  She completed her B.S. at Cornell University in 2006.