Associate Professor
Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics,
School of Engineering, University of Tokyo,
Abstract: Jamming phenomena are seen not only at a motorway, but also at a concert hall and an internet network. There is universality of jam formation among various sorts of flows. This is one of the central topics of physics of complex systems for the last few decades. We recently call this interdisciplinary research on jamming of self-driven particles as ``jamology''. In the talk, starting from the backgroud of this research, a simple mathematical model, called the asymmetric simple exclusion process, is introduced as basis ofall kinds of traffic flow. Then it is extended in order to account various traffic phenomena, and the comparison between
theory and experiment is given to show that the models are able to capture fundamental features of observations.
Plenary talk 2:
Professor
Bristol Robotics Laboratory
University of the West of England
Abstract: Foraging is a benchmark problem in robotics ? especially for distributed autonomous robotic systems. This paper argues that the systematic study of robot foraging is important for several reasons: firstly, because foraging is a metaphor for the broad class of problems integrating robotic exploration, navigation and object identification, manipulation and transport; secondly, in multi-robot systems foraging is a canonical problem for the study of robot-robot cooperation; and thirdly, many and diverse actual or potential real-world applications for robotics are instances of foraging robots, for example, for cleaning, harvesting, search and rescue, landmine clearance or planetary astrobiology. This paper sets out a theoretical framework, structured upon an abstract model and taxonomy of robot foraging. A framework which, it is hoped, might provide the basis of a principled approach to the engineering of future real-world robot foraging systems.
Keynote speech:
Professor
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Johns Hopkins University
Abstract: This talk will discuss issues in the design, construction andanalysis of ''self-replicating robots,'' i.e., robots that can make copiesof themselves from spare parts. Videos of toy robots that can replicatewill be shown. In order to quantify the robustness of such robots, measuresof the degree of environmental uncertainty that they can handle must becomputed. The entropy of the set of all possible arrangements (or configurations)of spare parts in the environment is just such a measure.
Closely related to self-replication is the topic of team diagnosis andrepair. In this scenario, a team of robots works cooperatively to performtasks. During this process, all members of the team diagnose each otherto determine if there is any abnormal behavior in any team member. Whenthere is, the members of the team cooperate to either repair or disassemblethe malfunctioning team member.