Keynotes

Prof. Antonio Bicchi University of Pisa, Italy

Towards a Society of Robots Behaviors, Misbehaviors, Consensus and Security

Abstract

In this talk I will consider how very large numbers of robots, differing in their bodies, sensing and intelligence, may be made to coexist, communicate, and compete fairly towards achieving their individual goals, i.e. to build a “society of robots”.

Some characteristics that the rules defining acceptable social behaviors should possess will be discussed. I will consider threats that may be posed to such a society by the misbehaviors of some of its members, due either to faults or malice, and the possibility to detect and isolate them through the cooperation of peers. The talk will present examples of protocols for planning motions that guarantee collision avoidance for arbitrarily large groups of heterogeneous robots, and discuss intrusion detection algorithms, which allow detection of deviance from such rules. I will further introduce algorithms to build a consensus view on what a "behaviour" and a "misbehaviour" is, the status of the environment and the integrity of peers, so as to improve the overall security of the society of robots. 

In the presentation, the mathematics of one of the technical enablers for the study of consensus, i.e. the theory of dynamical systems on Boolean algebras, will be introduced and illustrated.

Bio

Antonio Bicchi received the "Laurea" degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pisa in 1984, and the Doctoral degree from the University of Bologna in 1989. After a post-doctoralf fellowship at the Artificial Intelligence lab , Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he joined the Faculty of Engineering in the University of Pisa in 1990.

He is Professor of Systems Theory and Robotics in the Department of Electrical Systems and Automation (DSEA) of the University of Pisa and the Director of the Interdepartmental Research Center "E. Piaggio'' of the University of Pisa , where he has been leading the Automation and Robotics group since 1990.

His main research interests are in i) Dynamics, kinematics and control of complex mechanical systems, including robots, autonomous vehicles, and automotive systems; ii) Haptics and Dexterous manipulation; iii) Theory and control of nonlinear systems, in particular hybrid (logic/dynamic, symbol/signal) systems.

He has published more than 200 papers on international journals, books, and refereed conferences.

Antonio Bicchi is a Fellow of IEEE , and elected Chair of the Conference Editorial Board of IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.

Past service: Vice President of IEEE Robotics and Automation Society for Member Activities; Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (see here for abstracts of lecture topics ); Chairman of the Technical Committee for Manufacturing, Automation, and Robotics Control (MARC) of IEEE Control Systems Society.

Prof. Mario Gerla UCLA Computer Science Department, USA

Abstract

There has been growing interest in using vehicle networking for mobile applications ranging from safe driving to location aware content distribution, intelligent transport, commerce and games. This unusual diversity of applications sets the Vehicular ad Hoc Network (VANET) apart from conventional MANETs used in tactical and civilian emergency scenarios and introduces new design challenges. In this talk we review the emerging VANET standard based on DSRC/IEEE 802.11p. We then introduce emerging vehicular applications and examine the new services they require beyond the standards. A representative scenario is urban sensing: vehicles monitor the environment, classify the events, e.g., license plates, chemical readings, radiation levels, and then generate metadata. The metadata in turn can be uploaded to Internet servers or can be kept on board of vehicles for future, forensic harvesting by Authorities. A related application is vehicle monitoring of traffic congestion and pollution. The information received from vehicles will be used by Navigator Servers and Transport Authority to dynamically adjust traffic flows and routes so as to minimize both travel delay and urban pollution. On the entertainment side, VANET unutilized bandwidth will allow passengers to down load favorite video streams and the younger generation to play network games with peers on other cars and/or across the Internet. The above applications exhibit remarkably different requirements in terms of delay, storage, bandwidth and security. We will outline the VANET services that are required to enable their smooth coexistence. We will then conclude the talk with preliminary experiments carried out on the UCLA Campus Vehicle Testbed (C-VeT).

Bio

Dr. Mario Gerla, Professor, UCLA, Computer Science Dept. Dr. Gerla received his Engineering degree from the Politecnico di Milano, Italy, in 1966 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from UCLA in 1970 and 1973. He became IEEE Fellow in 2002. At UCLA, he was part of a small team that developed the early ARPANET protocols under the guidance of Prof. Leonard Kleinrock. He worked at Network Analysis Corporation, New York, from 1973 to 1976, transferring the ARPANET technology to several Government and Commercial Networks. He joined the Faculty of the Computer Science Department at UCLA in 1976, where he is now Professor. At UCLA he has designed and implemented some of the most popular and cited network protocols for ad hoc wireless networks including distributed clustering, multicast (ODMRP and CODECast) and transport (TCP Westwood) under DARPA and NSF grants. He has lead the $12M, 6 year ONR MINUTEMAN project, designing the next generation scalable airborne Internet for tactical and homeland defense scenarios. He is now leading two advanced wireless network projects under ARMY and IBM funding. In the commercial network scenario, with NSF and Industry sponsorship, he has led the development of vehicular communications for safe navigation, urban sensing and location awareness. A parallel research activity covers personal P2P communications including cooperative, networked medical monitoring (see www.cs.ucla.edu/NRL for recent publications).