Dr. Dylan Shell, assistant professor of computer science and engineering at Texas A&M University, was a co-organizer of "The Future of Multiple Robot Research and its Multiple Identities." The workshop was held at the 2014 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) in Chicago.
Shell and his co-organizers, Lorenzo Sabattini from the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in Italy, Antonio Franchi from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France, and Nora Ayanian from the University of Southern California, invited world-renown robotics researchers to give presentations. Multi-robot research topics under discussion covered agricultural applications, underwater floating manipulation systems, teams of humans and robots, and common characteristics of multi-robot systems.
Taking part in the presentations and discussions were Rachid Alami from France, Georgia Tech's Magnus Egerstedt, Northwestern University's Randy Freeman, Vijay Kumar from the University of Pennsylvania, MIT's Jonathan P. How, Ani Hsieh from Drexel University, Volkan Isler from the University of Minnesota, Anibal Ollero from the University of Seville in Spain, University of Tennessee's Lynne Parker, Mac Schwager from Boston University, and Kosuke Sekiyama from Nagoya University in Japan.
Shell received his doctoral degree in computer science from the University of Southern California in 2008. He worked as a postdoctoral research associate at USC before joining the faculty of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M. Shell is a 2013 recipient of the prestigious Montague-CTE Scholar grant. His research interests include distributed AI, biologically-inspired multi-robot systems, coordinated system, analysis of multi-agent systems, and crowd modeling.
The computer science and engineering department was well represented at IROS 2014. Other conference participants were Dr. Dezhen Song, associate professor and director of the NetBot Lab at Texas A&M, and Dr. Nancy M. Amato, Unocal Professor, OSIS Director, and co-director of the Parasol Lab at Texas A&M. Both professors' Ph.D. students, Joseph Lee (NetBot Lab) and Troy McMahon (Parasol Lab), presented papers during the event. Additionally, Amato and Dr. Robin M. Murphy, Raytheon Professor and director of the TEES Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue at Texas A&M, gave session keynote talks.