Informatics seminar on Thursday, December 4th at 16.30 - Danilo Ansaloni
Staff - Faculty of Informatics
Start date: 4 December 2008
End date: 5 December 2008
The Faculty of Informatics is pleased to announce a seminar given by Danilo Ansaloni
TITLE: The PIM: An Innovative Robot Coordination Model based on Java Thread Migration
SPEAKER: Danilo Ansaloni, Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC), Pensacola, Florida
DATE: Thursday, December 4th, 2008
PLACE: USI Università della Svizzera italiana, room SI-008, Informatics building (Via G. Buffi 13)
TIME: 16.30-17.00
ABSTRACT:
There is a growing demand to apply multi-robot systems to address many current problems ranging from search and rescue to distributed surveillance to coordination of small satellites in space. Solving these problems effectively requires that
teams of robots coordinate effectively. Many of the algorithms for coordination are based on the so-called centralized paradigm, where a central controlling authority is responsible for coordinating the entire team of robots. Unfortunately, centralized approaches often fall short when
dealing with rapidly changing situations, unreliability of communications, and failure of robots, especially in hostile environments. Distributed approaches, in an effort to address such issues, tend to introduce complex negotiation or market-based strategies for distributed task
execution, sometimes resulting in cumbersome programming models and suboptimal solutions. The PIM (Process Integrated Mechanism) is a brand new coordinating approach that aims to solve these problems. The core idea of the PIM is to retain the perspective of the single
controlling authority but abandon the notion that it must have a fixed location within the system.
Instead, the single coordinating thread is rapidly moved among the team members. The PIM leverages on Java thread mobility to preserve the optimality of the centralized approach, while effectively addressing most of its weaknesses (e.g. sluggish response to dynamic conditions, communication difficulties, and a single point of failure). A prototype implementation of such a model is presented, along with some preliminary performance results.
BIO:
Danilo Ansaloni is a Research Associate at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) in Pensacola, Florida. He received his BSc. and MSc. in Computer Science Engineering from the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in 2005 and in 2008. His research interests include
distributed computing, virtual machines, network security and Internet-based collaboration tools.
Currently, he is participating at the PIM project under the direction of Niranjan Suri (IHMC).
HOST: Prof. Walter Binder
