Event

Abstract
The use of autonomous mobile robots in human environments is on the rise. Assistive robots have been seen in real-world environments, such as robot guides in airports, robot polices in public parks, and patrolling robots in supermarkets. In this talk, I will first present current research activities conducted in the Robotics and Automation Laboratory at Stevens. I’ll then focus on robot-assisted pedestrian regulation, where pedestrian flows are regulated and optimized through passive human-robot interaction. We design feedback motion control for a robot to efficiently interact with pedestrians to achieve desirable collective motion. Both adaptive dynamic programming and deep reinforcement learning methods are applied to the formulated problem of robot-assisted pedestrian flow optimization. Simulation results in a robot simulator show that our approach regulates pedestrian flows and achieves optimized outflow learning from the real-time observation of the pedestrian flow. Potential crowd disasters can be avoided as the critical crowd pressure is reduced by the proposed approach.

Biography
Yi Guo is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology, where she joined in 2005 as an Assistant Professor. She obtained her Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Information Engineering from University of Sydney, Australia, in 1999. She was a postdoctoral research fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory from 2000 to 2002, and a Visiting Assistant Professor at University of Central Florida from 2002 to 2005. Her main research interests include autonomous mobile robotics, distributed sensor networks, and nonlinear control systems.  She has published more than 120 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers, authored the book entitled “Distributed Cooperative Control: Emerging Applications” (John Wiley & Sons 2017), and edited a book on micro/nano-robotics for biomedical applications (Springer 2013). She currently serves on the editorial boards of IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, and IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics. She served in Organizing Committees of ICRA (2015, 2014, 2008, 2006) and IROS (2020, 2019).