The Robotics Institute

My principal research objective is to define and advance the science of technology for developing communities (TFDC); that is, technology relevant to communities where monetary resources are scarce, and the accessible infrastructure and indigenous skills are very different from the norms prevalent in the technologically developed world. My goal is to build technology that empowers these underserved communities in a manner that is culturally relevant and locally sustainable. To this end, I founded TechBridgeWorld (www.techbridgeworld.org) at Carnegie Mellon University to provide the necessary infrastructure for collaborative work between the university and underserved communities around the world. TechBridgeWorld extends the benefits of technology to developing communities, thus promoting a novel field of research that uniquely enhances the world we live in.

A second important research goal is to advance the state of the art in autonomous team coordination. Much of my work to date with team coordination deals with market-based systems where team members conduct and participate in auctions to allocate tasks and resources. My dissertation work laid the foundation for the TraderBots coordination framework that is now a licensed tool used by several groups for research and development in team coordination. My goal for autonomous team coordination is to advance the understanding and the science of market-based coordination mechanisms. I am primarily interested in applications of team coordination in uncertain and dynamic conditions, and in enabling robust, intelligent, and effective coordination of limited resources under these conditions using market-based approaches. An important aspect of this work is to understand and enable effective human-robot teams engaged in complex tasks. My work in team coordination is relevant to TFDC applications such as disaster relief and some of this work is evolving to explicitly address needs in disaster response.

Founding member and graduate faculty advisor for women@SCS