ECE Associate Professor Awarded Funding from NASA EPSCoR MS RID Grants
December 6, 2023
An associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Mississippi State University was recently awarded funding to develop human-in-the-loop heterogeneous multi-robot decision making for motion planning and mapping.
Dr. Chaomin Luo
Chaomin Luo received a grant from the Mississippi NASA EPSCoR Research Infrastructure Development (RID) Program for his project titled “Human-Robot Interaction-based Heterogeneous Multi-robot Decision Making for Motion Planning and Mapping with a Human-in-the-loop.”
The Mississippi NASA EPSCoR RID Program supports research addressing high-priority NASA research and technology development needs. Luo said his project innovatively integrates human factors into heterogeneous autonomous robot teams to improve the overall intelligent decision-making performance.
“It focuses on enhancing collaboration and coordination among diverse robots by integrating human-in-the-loop interfaces and real-time feedback learning-based decision-making mechanisms,” Luo said.
He added the task is extremely challenging due to high real-time navigation requirements in off-road environment uncertainty.
“The project attempts to be at the intersection of robotics, AI, and human-autonomy interaction, with the goal of creating a collaborative framework where humans and robots collaborate seamlessly to accomplish tasks that may be challenging or impossible for a single robot to complete alone in off-road terrains. It will push the boundaries by developing dynamic motion planning and mapping techniques for multi-agent swarms,” he said.
Luo added the swarms are deployed in scenarios like in-situ resource utilization to collect data and create datasets in support of NASA’s autonomous exploration research.
Luo’s research focuses primarily on development and implementation of practically feasible, computationally efficient, and theoretically solid bio-inspired intelligence techniques for real-time motion control, navigation, and mapping of autonomous agents, with applications in precision agriculture, search and rescue, and off-road autonomous vehicles. Learn more about Dr. Chaomin Luo’s research here.
The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Mississippi State University consists of 27 faculty members (including seven endowed professors), seven professional staff, and over 700 undergraduate and graduate students, with approximately 100 being at the Ph.D. level. With a research expenditure of over $14.24 million, the department houses the largest High Voltage Laboratory among North American universities.