Keynote Speakers
Information about Henry Markram and his talk will be avialable soon.
Daniela Rus (MIT) : Programmable Matter with Self-reconfiguring Robots
We wish to create programmable matter by using robot modules capable
of self-reconfiguration: hundreds of small modules autonomously
organize and reorganize as geometric structures to best fit the
terrain on which the robot has to move, the shape of the object the
robot has to manipulate, or the sensing needs of the given
task. Self-reconfiguration leads to versatile robots that can support
multiple modalities of locomotion, manipulation, and perception.
This talk will discuss the challenges of creating programmable matter,
ranging from designing hardware capable of self-reconfiguration, to
developing distributed controllers and planners for such systems that
are scalable, adaptive, and support real-time behavior. We will
discuss a spectrum of mechanical and computational capabilities for
such systems and detail some recent self-reconfiguring robots.
About Daniela Rus:
Daniela Rus is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science, where she is associate director of MIT's Computer Science and
Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and co-directs the MIT Center for
Robotics at CSAIL. Her research interests include distributed
robotics and mobile computing and her application focus includes
transportation, security, environmental modeling and monitoring,
underwater exploration, and agriculture.
Rus is notable for spear-heading research in programmable matter by
developing the several self-configuring robots. In addition, she
worked with her students to has designed, control, and field
autonomous underwater robots, agricultural robots that herd cattle,
low-cost, early warning sensors for disaster prevention in developing
countries, and teams of autonomour aerial vehicles that can monitor
adaptively large environments.
Rus is the recipient of the NSF Career Award and an Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation Fellow. She is a Class of 2002 MacArthur Fellow and a
fellow of AAAI and IEEE. Before receiving her appointment at MIT,
Rus was a professor in the Computer Science Department at Dartmouth,
where she founded and directed two laboratories in robotics and mobile
computing.
Rus earned her PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University.
last modified: 2010/02/24
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