Multi-Robots Workshop
IEEE Kingston Section + Ingenuity Labs present Multi-Robots Workshop
This event brings three multi-robots specialist from different backgrounds to talk about their research and tranding topics in the field.
Registration is free
Dr. Melissa Greeff is an Assistant Professor at Queen's University and leads the Robora Lab. Her research interests include aerial robots, vision-based navigation, and safe learning-based control.
Dr. P. Travis Jardine is an adjunct professor at Queen's University and is an early member of the Autonomous Robotics Research Group. His research lies at the intersection of control, learning, and cooperation in multi-agent robotic systems.
Dr. Jean-Alexis Delamer is an Assistant Professor at St. Francis Xavier University. His primary research interests include Artificial Intelligence applied to Robotics, particularly Markov decision processes; POMDPs; Game Theory; Path Planning; UAVs.
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- 69 Union St.
- Kingston, Ontario
- Canada K7L 2N9
- Building: Mitchell Hall
- Room Number: 395
- Click here for Map
- Starts 11 March 2026 04:00 AM UTC
- Ends 09 May 2026 04:00 AM UTC
- 1 in-person space left!
- No Admission Charge
Speakers
Melissa of Queen's University
Robots Helping Robots: Enhancing Cross-Modal Interactions Between Aerial, Ground, and Surface Vessel Robots
Single aerial robot systems can achieve high speed flight in challenging GPS-denied conditions enabling remote surveillance, package delivery and infrastructure inspection. However, we can further enhance robot operability in diverse environments (from air to land to marine) by augmenting the autonomous capabilities of single aerial, ground or surface vessels through cross-modal interactions. In this talk, we will discuss two different applications that benefit from cross-modality. Firstly, we explore how to leverage aerial robot imagery to enable GPS-denied, zero-shot autonomous navigation for ground vehicles in untraversed environments. Secondly, we explore how to co-ordinate autonomous aerial and surface vessels to enable the landing of aerial vehicles on surface vessels to recharge in remote marine or limnology applications. This is done by accommodating spatial and temporal uncertainties in the waves that can make landing challenging. These preliminary technologies have the potential to enable more persistent operation of robots in diverse environments.
Biography:
Dr Melissa Greeff is an assistant professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Queen’s University. She is an Ingenuity Labs Robotics and AI Institute Member. She leads Robora Lab. Her research interests include aerial robots, vision-based navigation, and safe learning-based control. She has published in various international robotics and control systems venues including IEEE Robotics and Auto. Letters, Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems, ICRA, IROS and CDC. She has helped co-organize various workshops on safe robot learning and benchmarking at various international conferences. Her research is supported by NSERC, CFI, MITACs, the Department of National Defense (DND) and various industry collaborators. Dr. Greeff ‘s expertise is in building autonomous aerial systems including previous experience in conducting field trials at various locations across Canada. She was listed as one of 50 women in robotics you need to know about in 2023 by the Women in Robotics organization.
Travis of Queen's University
Hidden Spaces for Robots to Coordinate
Coordination of robot swarms is often achieved through agreement on physical states such as position, velocity, or acceleration. In recent work, we showed that stable formations can instead emerge through negotiation in a lower-dimensional latent space induced by geometric embeddings. Appropriately constructed embeddings yield globally stable equilibria based solely on local observations while simultaneously linearizing the system. We extend this work by applying learning techniques to optimize the geometry of the swarm along the resultant equilibrium manifold. We highlight open challenges, including maintaining cohesion and ensuring convergence of the swarm as agents learn locally.
Biography:
Dr. P. Travis Jardine is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the School of Computing at Queen’s University and an early member of the Autonomous Robotics Research Group. His research lies at the intersection of control, learning, and cooperation in multi-agent robotic systems.
Jean-Alexis of St. Francis Xavier University
From Coordination to Autonomy: Mechanism Design, Deep Reinforcement Learning, and Adaptive Strategy Selection for Multi-
Coordinating teams of autonomous robots is difficult when agents must balance their own objectives against the needs of the group. In this talk, we explore how mechanism design, a framework borrowed from economics, can structure cooperation across the full range of a multi-robot mission: from training agents to work together, to assigning tasks across a UAV fleet, to choosing how a single robot navigates a crowded space. We discuss what this perspective offers, where it falls short, and what remains open as these systems move closer to real-world deployment.
Biography:
Jean-Alexis Delamer is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at St. Francis Xavier University. He holds a Ph.D. (2019) in Robotics and Automation from the Université de Toulouse, France. Before his current appointment, he served as a PostDoc at Queen's University. His primary research interests include Artificial Intelligence applied to Robotics, particularly Markov decision processes; POMDPs; Game Theory; Path Planning; UAVs.