Abstract: Peng Gao is now a postdoc associate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Previously, He got the Postdoc Fellowship from the Maryland Robotics Center, advised by Dr. Ming C. Lin at the University of Maryland, College Park. He obtained his Ph.D. degree at the Colorado School of Mines in 2022, supervised by Dr. Hao Zhang in the Human-Centered Robotics Lab. He is now serving as the Associate Editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RAL). In addition, he is the first author of the best paper award for Agri-Robot at IEEE 2023 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).

 

Dr. Gao ‘s central theme of his research focuses on collaborative autonomy to enable team awareness for multi-robot and human-autonomy teaming. This vision seeks to empower autonomous robots with the ability to collaboratively and autonomously comprehend both unstructured environments and their human and robotic teammates, thereby surpassing human-level collaboration for complex tasks in open-world settings.

 

Short Bio: Robotics has a profound impact on many aspects of our daily lives, such as intelligent transportation, intelligent home services, and unmanned space exploration. With the development of robotics, there is an inevitable question that we need to answer: How do we enable collaborative perception and cooperative behaviors in robots? In this talk, I will present my past research and future plans that aims to touch this question. Specifically, I will mainly discuss (1). how we coordinate robots to collaboratively understand the environments in real-world settings, such as without GPS, as well as with limited communication constraint, (2) how we make robots to adaptively cooperate with each other for complex tasks, such as collaborative task scheduling, connected autonomous driving, cooperative transportation, and navigation.