Multi-robot teams with Vijay Kumar and Daniel Mellinger

Link to audio file (52:46)

Happy New Year from the whole Robots Podcast team! Don’t miss our amazing holiday robot videos!

For this last episode of 2010 we look at multi-robot teams and impressive quadrotor capabilities with Vijay Kumar from the GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania and one of his PhD students, Daniel Mellinger.

Vijay Kumar

Vijay Kumar is Professor at the GRASP Lab and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at UPenn.

As an expert in networked multi-agent systems, he’ll be telling us how he sees robot teams of tomorrow being deployed in real-world missions. Challenges include keeping the robots networked, selecting the right level of autonomy and figuring out how to deal with large swarms of heterogenous robots.

Among the robots he sees doing team work are flying robots including quadrotors that use SLAM to get around or that can perform impressive aggressive maneuvers.

Daniel Mellinger

Daniel Mellinger is a PhD student at the GRASP Lab. He’s a rising star in dynamic control and has been featured in the media and on YouTube for his work with quadrotors passing through hoops and performing amazing motions.

We also speak about his latest work on transporting large objects using cooperative teams of quadrotors. This work got him the best paper award during the recent International Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems at EPFL.

Links:

• Download mp3 (28.5 MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS
• Vijay Kumar’s Homepage
• Daniel Mellinger’s Homepage

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Podcast team The ROBOTS Podcast brings you the latest news and views in robotics through its bi-weekly interviews with leaders in the field.

Podcast team The ROBOTS Podcast brings you the latest news and views in robotics through its bi-weekly interviews with leaders in the field.