Yi Guo of Stevens Institute of Technology

The use of autonomous mobile robots in human environments is on the rise. Assistive robots have been seen in real-world environments, such as robot guides in airports, robot polices in public parks, and patrolling robots in supermarkets. In this talk, I will first present current research activities conducted in the Robotics and Automation Laboratory at Stevens. I’ll then focus on robot-assisted pedestrian regulation, where pedestrian flows are regulated and optimized through passive human-robot interaction. We design feedback motion control for a robot to efficiently interact with pedestrians to achieve desirable collective motion. Both adaptive dynamic programming and deep reinforcement learning methods are applied to the formulated problem of robot-assisted pedestrian flow optimization. Simulation results in a robot simulator show that our approach regulates pedestrian flows and achieves optimized outflow learning from the real-time observation of the pedestrian flow. Potential crowd disasters can be avoided as the critical crowd pressure is reduced by the proposed approach.

Biography:

Yi Guo joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology in 2005, and is currently Thomas E. Hattrick Chair Professor.  Before 2005, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the ECE Department of the University of Central Florida.  Dr. Guo received her Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Information Engineering in 1999 from the University of Sydney, Australia. After her Ph.D, she worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for two years. Dr. Guo’s research interests are mainly in distributed and collaborative robotic systems, human-robot interaction, and dynamic systems and controls. She author one book, edited one book, and published over 150 journal and conference papers. She is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine. She has been Associate Editor of IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, and IEEE Access.  Her awards include Best Application Paper Award at WCICA2018, and Provost’s Award for Research Excellence from Stevens in 2020. She frequently gave invited talks and presented a Keynote Speech at IROS in 2019. She served in Organizing Committees of the premier robotics conference ICRA and IROS.

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