Multi-robot systems are becoming more pervasive all around us, in the form of fleets of autonomous vehicles, future delivery drones, and robotic teammates for search and rescue. As a result, it becomes increasingly critical to question the robustness of their coordination algorithms to reliable information exchange, security threats and/or corrupted data. This talk will focus on the role of control and information exchange for enhancing situational awareness and security of multirobot systems. An example is the consensus problem where classical results hold that agreement cannot be reached when malicious agents make up more than half of the network connectivity; this quickly leads to limitations in the practicality of many multi-robot coordination tasks. However, with the growing prevalence of cyber-physical systems comes novel opportunities for detecting attacks by using cross-validation with physical channels of information. In this talk we consider the class of problems where the probability of a particular (i,j) link being trustworthy is available as a random variable. We refer to these as “stochastic observations of trust.” We show that under this model, strong performance guarantees such as convergence for the consensus problem can be recovered, even in the case where the number of malicious agents is greater than ½ of the network connectivity and consensus would otherwise fail. We will present both a theoretical framework, and experimental results, for provably securing multi-robot distributed algorithms through careful use of communication. Lastly, we will present promising results on new communication-centric methods for learning and sequential decision-making in tomorrow’s multi-robot systems.
Bio: Stephanie is an Assistant Professor in the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) at Harvard University. Her work centers around trust and coordination in multi-robot systems for which she has received the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator award (2021) and the National Science Foundation CAREER award (2019). She has also been selected as a 2020 Sloan Research Fellow for her contributions at the intersection of robotics and communication. She has held a Visiting Assistant Professor position at Stanford University during the summer of 2019, and an Assistant Professorship at Arizona State University from 2018-2020. She completed her Ph.D. work (2014) on multi-robot coordination and control and her 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.
