The Distributed Intelligence Laboratory was founded in August of 2002 by Prof. Lynne E. Parker and is engaged in research in cooperative robotics and distributed artificial intelligence. Our research is focused on the computational issues of distributed intelligent systems -- particularly embodied intelligent systems that have a physical instantiation in the world, such as multi-robot teams, sensor networks, or software agents. We characterize distributed intelligent systems as multiple entities that integrate perception, reasoning, and action to perform cooperative tasks under circumstances that are insufficiently known in advance, and dynamically changing during task execution.

Our work is computational, in that we develop new algorithms and software architectures that have provable properties. We focus on basic research that leads to fundamental new concepts that can be demonstrated on real robot or sensor network hardware.

Particular questions that we study include:

• How can globally coherent solutions be generated through the dynamic interaction of distributed intelligent entities that have only local information?
• How can heterogeneous entities share capabilities to accomplish collaborative tasks?
• How can distributed intelligent systems learn, and thus improve their performance over time, or recognize and manage faults or anomalous situations?

We research these questions in the context of human-robot interaction, multi-robot coalition formation, constructivist autonomous learning, fault tolerant cooperative control, mobile sensor network planning and deployment, and sensor network modeling and anomaly detection. The outcomes of our research are algorithms and software techniques that provide intelligent interaction capabilities to distributed embodied systems, reported through the peer-reviewed literature.

These research developments have high relevance to practical applications in a wide variety of domains, including: security, surveillance, and reconnaissance; planetary exploration; search and rescue; cleanup of hazardous waste; mining; construction; automated manufacturing; industrial/household maintenance; and nuclear power plant decommissioning.

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