{"667476":{"#nid":"667476","#data":{"type":"event","title":"Ph.D. Dissertation Defense - Esmaeil Seraj","body":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cspan\u003E\u003Cspan\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003E\u003Cspan\u003ETitle\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/strong\u003E\u003Cem\u003E\u003Cspan\u003E:\u0026nbsp; \u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/em\u003E\u003Cem\u003E\u003Cspan\u003EEnhancing Teamwork in Multi-Robot Systems: Embodied Intelligence via Model- and Data-Based Approaches\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/em\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cspan\u003E\u003Cspan\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003E\u003Cspan\u003ECommittee:\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/strong\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cspan\u003E\u003Cspan\u003E\u003Cspan\u003EDr. \u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan\u003EMatthew Gombolay, IC, Chair\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan\u003E, Advisor \u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cspan\u003E\u003Cspan\u003E\u003Cspan\u003EDr. \u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan\u003ESeth Hutchinson, ECE\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cspan\u003E\u003Cspan\u003E\u003Cspan\u003EDr. \u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan\u003EChaouki Abdallah, ECE\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cspan\u003E\u003Cspan\u003E\u003Cspan\u003EDr. \u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan\u003EHarish Ravichandar, IC\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cspan\u003E\u003Cspan\u003E\u003Cspan\u003EDr. \u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan\u003EMarynel Vasquez, Yale\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n","summary":"","format":"limited_html"}],"field_subtitle":"","field_summary":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EHigh-performing human teams leverage intelligent and efficient communication and coordination strategies to collaboratively maximize their joint utility. Inspired by teaming behaviors among humans, I seek to develop computational methods for synthesizing intelligent communication and coordination strategies for collaborative multi-robot systems. In my thesis, I leverage both classical model-based control and planning approaches as well as data-driven methods such as Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) and Learning from Demonstration (LfD) to provide several contributions towards enabling emergent cooperative teaming behavior across robot teams. In my thesis, I first leverage model-based methods for coordinated control and planning under uncertainty for multi-robot systems o study and develop techniques for efficiently incorporating environment models in multi-robot planning and decision making. In these contributions, I design centralized and decentralized coordination frameworks, at the control-input and the high-level planning stages, which are informed by and have access to the model of the world. Model-based approaches provide the ability to derive performance and stability guarantees. However, can be sensitive to the accuracy of the model and the quality of the heuristic algorithm. As such, I leverage data-driven and Machine Learning (ML) approaches, such as MARL, to provide several contributions towards learning emergent cooperative behaviors. I design a graph-based architecture to learn efficient and diverse communication models for coordinating cooperative heterogeneous teams. Finally, inspired by the theory of mind in humans\u0027 strategic decision-making model, I develop an iterative model to learn deep decision-rationalization for optimizing action selection in collaborative, decentralized teaming. As multi-robot systems become increasingly prevalent in our communities and workplace, aligning the values motivating their behavior with human values is critical. As such, in the last portion of my thesis, I propose a novel Multi-agent LfD approach to learning high-quality collaborative multi-robot policies directly from human-expert generated data, which can result in lower sample complexity and directly learning human\u0027s preferred strategy.\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n","format":"limited_html"}],"field_summary_sentence":[{"value":"Enhancing Teamwork in Multi-Robot Systems: Embodied Intelligence via Model- and Data-Based Approaches "}],"uid":"28475","created_gmt":"2023-04-21 22:11:10","changed_gmt":"2023-04-21 22:11:10","author":"Daniela Staiculescu","boilerplate_text":"","field_publication":"","field_article_url":"","field_event_time":{"event_time_start":"2023-04-24T11:00:00-04:00","event_time_end":"2023-04-24T13:00:00-04:00","event_time_end_last":"2023-04-24T13:00:00-04:00","gmt_time_start":"2023-04-24 15:00:00","gmt_time_end":"2023-04-24 17:00:00","gmt_time_end_last":"2023-04-24 17:00:00","rrule":null,"timezone":"America\/New_York"},"location":"4211 Conference Room MRDC","extras":[],"related_links":[{"url":"https:\/\/gatech.zoom.us\/j\/94177027379","title":"Zoom link"}],"groups":[{"id":"434381","name":"ECE Ph.D. Dissertation Defenses"}],"categories":[],"keywords":[{"id":"192484","name":"PhD Defense, graduate students"}],"core_research_areas":[],"news_room_topics":[],"event_categories":[{"id":"1788","name":"Other\/Miscellaneous"}],"invited_audience":[{"id":"78771","name":"Public"}],"affiliations":[],"classification":[],"areas_of_expertise":[],"news_and_recent_appearances":[],"phone":[],"contact":[],"email":[],"slides":[],"orientation":[],"userdata":""}}}