Patrick Doherty is a Professor of Computer Science at the Department of Computer and Information Sciences (IDA), Linköping University, Sweden. He leads the Artificial Intelligence and Integrated Computer Systems Division at IDA. He is an ECCAI/EurAI fellow, a AAIA fellow, and a member of ACM and AAAI. He previously served as Editor-in-Chief of the Artificial Intelligence Journal. He has over 30 years of experience in areas such as knowledge representation and reasoning, automated planning, intelligent autonomous systems and multi-agent systems. A major area of application is with Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS). He has over 200 refereed scientific publications in his areas of expertise and has given numerous keynote and invited talks at leading international conferences.

Title: Collaborative Robotics for Emergency Rescue: A Distributed Task and Information Perspective

Abstract: In the context of collaborative robotics, both distributed planning and task allocation, and situation awareness are essential for supporting goal achievement, collective intelligence and decision support in teams of robots and human agents. This is particularly important in applications pertaining to emergency rescue and crisis management. Given a high-level mission specification, provided by a member of a rescue team, human or robotic, one requires a mechanism for generating and executing complex, multi-agent distributed plans and tasks. The proper task representation is essential for both the generation and execution of complex multi-agent distributed tasks. Task Specification Trees have been proposed for this purpose and a Delegation Framework is used for distributed task allocation. Additionally, during operational missions, data and knowledge is gathered incrementally and in different ways by teams of heterogeneous robots and humans. We describe this as the formation and management of Hastily Formed Knowledge Networks (HFKN). The resulting distributed knowledge structures can then by queried by individual agents for decision support. These structures are represented as RDF graphs and graph synchronization techniques are introduced to retain consistency of the collective knowledge of a team.
In this talk, I will present both the HFKN and Delegation Frameworks, their integration, and in addition describe various field robotic experiments with UAVs which use the overall system. If time allows, I will also discuss a Swedish national project where this framework has been used by both industrial and academic partners in large public safety scenarios using UAVs, USVs and AUVs in maritime and sea rescue scenarios.