Academic Seminar | Enhancing Productivity through Smart Robots: Computational Intelligence for Planning, Decision-Making, and Control
Topic: Enhancing Productivity through Smart Robots: Computational Intelligence for Planning, Decision-Making, and Control
Time & Date: 13:00-14:00, January 24, Wednesday
Venue: Room 109, Zhi Xin Building
Speaker: Prof. Zhang Chongjie
Tsinghua University
Abstract: Recent advances in hardware and sensing for industrial robots have opened the way for the use of these systems in manufacturing beyond traditional automobile and semiconductor industries. The key challenge in harnessing the full capability of these robotic systems will be to coordinate the work sharing and scheduling among multiple robots, and across multiple work cells within the factory.
In this talk, I will present a computational solution for enabling factory-scale multi-robot systems to efficiently collaborate in manufacturing environments. This solution provides 1) a tractable multi-level optimization approach for sequencing and scheduling of robot work across multiple work cells in a factory, 2) a novel decision-making model and method of dealing with environment uncertainty and dynamics due to robot servicing and other unanticipated delays in the build process, and 3) an integrated method for co-optimizing task and motion planning to improve individual robot performance.
Biography: Chongjie Zhang is an Assistant Professor in the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences at Tsinghua University. Before joining the faculty, he was a postdoctoral associate in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) at MIT on studying robotics with applications on manufacturing. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 2011. His research interests span machine learning, multi-agent systems, and robotics, aiming to develop computational models and methods for intelligent systems to harness the power of collaboration to accomplish tasks of higher complexity.