ECE Research Seminar with Dr. Lei- Friday, February 23 12-1pm
February 19, 2024
Please join us for our February 2024 ECE Research Seminar
February 23, 2024, Friday, 12:00 – 1:00 pm, Simrall 228
https://msstate.webex.com/msstate/j.php?MTID=mec8666c684ca4d98b1fda073ba3f606b
Safety-Aware Autonomous Robot Navigation, Mapping, and Control by Optimization Techniques
Tingjun Lei | tl1320@msstate.edu
Abstract: The realm of autonomous robotics has seen impressive advancements in recent years, with robots taking on essential roles in various sectors, including disaster response, environmental monitoring, agriculture, and healthcare. As these highly intelligent machines continue to integrate into our daily lives, the pressing imperative is to elevate and refine their performance, enabling them to adeptly manage complex tasks with remarkable efficiency, adaptability, and keen decision-making abilities, all while prioritizing safety-aware navigation, mapping, and control systems. Ensuring the safety-awareness of these robotic systems is of paramount importance in their development and deployment. This research focuses on enhancing safety-aware navigation, mapping, and control systems for autonomous robots, employing bio-inspired neural networks, deep learning, heuristic algorithms, and optimization techniques. Optimization algorithms are utilized for safe and efficient robot navigation, with a bio-inspired neural network local navigator coupled with dynamic moving windows enhancing obstacle avoidance and refining safe trajectories. Multi-robot task allocation is optimized for effectiveness and efficiency, especially in disaster responses, employing spatial dislocation schemes and velocity profile paradigms for collision avoidance. Human-autonomy teaming strategies are optimized to enable effective cooperation between robots and human experts, leveraging tree mechanisms like Rapidly Exploring Random Tree (RRT) and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for navigation and information search. Optimization-driven shared control and decision-making ensure balanced power distribution between humans and robots to enhance overall effectiveness and efficiency.
Dr. Tingjun Lei is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Mississippi State University (MSU). He received the B.S. degree in transportation engineering from Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai, China, in 2014, received the M.S. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the New York Institute of Technology, Old Westbury, NY, USA, in 2016, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from MSU in 2023. He received the Best Paper Award in 2022 International Conference on Swarm Intelligence. His research interests include intelligent transportation systems, robotics and autonomous systems, deep learning, and evolutionary computation.
* For further information contact: Dr. Jenny Du | du@ece.msstate.edu | 5-2035
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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.