• Attended Southern California Robotics Symposium 2023 with ten undergraduate and graduate students in our department. Here are some photos.
• Congratulations to undergraduate students Jessica and Zari, who give a presentation at Southern California Robotics Symposium 2023 (SCR2023).

• Justin Ruiz (undergraduate student)
• Zari Justine Magnaye (undergraduate student)
• Jessica Gonzalez (undergraduate student)
• Christopher Gonzalez (graduate student)
• Ryan Steubs (graduate student)
• Aaron Malone (undergraduate student)
• Lynn Gao (PH.D. student at UCR Statistics Deparment)
• Soham Patil (graduate student)
• Vincent Mak (graduate student)

Multi-robot systems consist of autonomous robots interacting in a shared environment to achieve common goals. They are widely used in real-world application domains such as transportation, disaster management, as well as warehousing and manufacturing. This project develops an efficient, robust, and secure multi-robot system, called EdgeRobot. EdgeRobot establishes an edge computing based architecture and algorithmic framework to facilitate multi-robot collaboration and coordination in dynamic environments. This work provides new model, architecture, and theory for coordinated multi-robot systems. In addition, this project builds research capacity, sustainable for training underrepresented students via the partnership of six geographically diverse minority-serving institutions in the United States: the University of North Texas (South), the University of Michigan Flint (North), CUNY-New York City College of Technology (Northeast), George Mason University (East), Arizona State University (Southwest), and California State University Dominguez Hills (West). The cross-institutional collaboration not only boosts research capacity in all six participating institutions but also provides integrative research and education experience to their underrepresented minority students. Ultimately, this project establishes and exemplifies an effective collaboration model for training and educating underrepresented students from geographically diverse minority-serving institutions.

Publications:

1. Prize-Collecting Traveling Salesman Problem: a Reinforcement Learning Approach [pdf]
   Justin Ruiz, Christopher Gonzalez,Yutian Chen, and Bin Tang
   Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC 2023).
2. Budget-Constrained Traveling Salesman Problem: a Reinforcement Learning Approach [Extended Abstract]
   Jessica Gonzalez, Zari Magnaye, Christopher Gonzalez,Yutian Chen, and Bin Tang
   The 2023 Southern California Robotics Symposium.

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 2240517.