摘   要:In multi-robot systems, robots work together to collectively, cooperatively, or collaboratively achieve tasks that are difficult or impossible for a single monolithic agent to accomplish; such systems, when appropriately designed, exhibit "distributed intelligence". Distributed intelligent systems have practical value in a wide variety of domains, including urban search and rescue, transportation and logistics, gaming technologies, and so forth. However, creating such systems is non-trivial, as it requires solutions to many challenging issues that arise in attempting to create globally coherent solutions from a collection of local knowledge and perspectives. This talk overviews our research in distributed intelligence in the context of multi-robot systems, which sense and interact in the physical world. Challenges that are studied include how to enable robot teams to autonomously collaborate, detect faults, learn, and adapt in their environment. Several examples will be discussed to illustrate these issues. An overview will also be given of the Center for Intelligent Systems and Machine Learning (CISML) at the University of Tennessee. CISML's focus is on designing computer-based systems that exhibit intelligent behavior, operate autonomously, and adapt to environmental changes. Examples of the diverse research activities in this area include pattern recognition, robotics, artificial intelligence, biologically-inspired cognitive architectures, bioinformatics, and data mining, to name a few.

报告人简介：Dr. Lynne Parker is Professor and Associate Head in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she directs the research of the Distributed Intelligence Laboratory and is the Director of the Center for Intelligent Systems and Machine Learning. Additionally, she holds an appointment as Adjunct Distinguished Research and Development Staff Member at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), where she worked as a full time researcher for several years. Dr. Parker received her Ph.D. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), performing her research in MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, with a minor in brain and cognitive science.

Dr. Parker is recognized as a leading international expert in the area of multi-robot systems – a field that she helped initiate with her dissertation work on this topic. Dr. Parker’s dissertation research (1994) on ALLIANCE, an architecture for multi-robot cooperation, was the first Ph.D. dissertation on the topic of multi-robot systems, and is considered a pioneering work in the field. Dr. Parker is an active leader in her field, and is a frequent invited speaker at international conferences, workshops, industries, and universities, having given over 90 invited lectures. Dr. Parker has published over 100 articles in the areas of mobile robot cooperation, human-robot cooperation, robotic learning, intelligent agent architectures, and robot navigation. For this research, she was awarded the PECASE (U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers)in 2000. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Conference Editorial Board, and is an elected Administrative Committee(AdCom) Member of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. She was a senior Editor of IEEE Transactions on Robotics for several years, and is on the Editorial Board of IEEE Intelligent Systems and the Swarm Intelligence Journal. She is a Fellow of IEEE.