April 30th, 2015 3:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m. 199 Toomey Hall DEPARTMENT OF MECHANICAL & AEROSPACE ENGINEERING MAE GRADUATE SEMINAR SERIES Information-driven Sensorimotor Planning and Control Dr. Silvia Ferrari Abstract Professor of Engineering and Computer Science Department of Mechanical and Materials Science Duke University, Durham, NC Unmanned ground, aerial, and underwater vehicles equipped with on-board wireless sensors are becoming crucial to both civilian and military applications because of their ability to replace or assist humans in carrying out dangerous yet vital missions. As they are often required to operate in unstructured and uncertain environments, these mobile sensor networks must be adaptive and reconfigurable, and decide future actions intelligently based on the sensor measurements and environmental information. Recent work on geometric and information-driven sensor path planning has shown that the performance of these sensors can be significantly improved by planning their paths based on probabilistic sensor models, and on the geometric characteristics of the workspace and of the sensor field-of-view or visibility region. This talk discusses a general framework by which the expected information value of sensor measurements can be described by information theoretic functions in closed form, and, consequently, used to obtain path planning and control laws for active sensing and information gathering. This talk also describes related research and graduate training opportunities available through the Duke Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT)Wireless Intelligent Sensor Networks (WISeNet). The purpose of the WISeNet program is to prepare Ph.D. students for interdisciplinary research in wireless sensor networks, and intelligent sensors capable of processing, storing, and learning from data so as to improve their ability to gather information over time. Silvia Ferrari is Professor of Engineering and Computer Science at Duke University and Adjunct Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University. She is the Director of the Laboratory for Intelligent Systems and Controls (LISC) and of the NSF Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program on Wireless Intelligent Sensor Networks (WISeNet) at Duke University. Her principal research interests include robust adaptive control of aircraft, learning and approximate dynamic programming, and optimal control of mobile sensor networks. She received the B.S. degree from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University. She is a senior member of the IEEE, and a member of ASME, SPIE, and AIAA. She is the recipient of the ONR young investigator award (2004), the NSF CAREER award (2005), and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) award (2006). This seminar is co-sponsored by the Academy of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineers Refreshments will be served at 3:15 p.m