Daniela Rus is an associate professor in the EECS Department at MIT. Previously, she was a professor in the computer science department at Dartmouth College. She holds a PhD degree in computer science form Cornell University. Her research interests include distributed robotics, mobile computing, and self-organization. She was the recipient of an NSF Career award. She is a Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow and a class of 2002 MacArthur Fellow.

More information on Kus can be found in: www.csail.mit.edu/~rus

Talk title:
Self-reconfiguring Robots: Successes and Challenges

Abstract:
A self-reconfiguring robot consists of a set of identical modules that can dynamically and autonomously reconfigure in a variety of shapes, to best fit the terrain, environment, and task. Self-reconfiguration leads to versatile robots that can support multiple modalities of locomotion and manipulation. Self-reconfiguring robots constitute large scale distributed systems. Because the modules change their location continuously they also constitute ad-hoc networks.

This talk will discuss the challenges and successes of creating self-reconfiguring robots, ranging from designing hardware capable self-reconfiguration to developing distributed controllers and planners for such systems that are scalable, adaptive, and support real-time behavior.