CS Colloq: Coordinating Multiple Moving Objects: From Robots to Microdroplets

Title: Coordinating Multiple Moving Objects: From Robots to MicrodropletsSpeaker: Prof. Srinivas AkellaABSTRACT:
Coordinating the collision-free motions of multiple moving objects is
a challenging problem, with applications ranging from automotive
workcells to lab-on-a-chip devices. I will first describe our work on
the coordination of multiple robots with dynamics constraints, with
applications in manufacturing cells and UAV coordination. I will then
describe the coordination of microdroplets in digital microfluidic
"lab-on-a-chip" systems. A digital microfluidic system controls
individual droplets of chemicals on an array of electrodes; the
chemical analysis is performed by moving, mixing, and splitting
droplets. This promising new technology can impact applications in
biological research, point-of-care clinical testing, and biochemical
sensing by offering tremendous flexibility and parallelism through
software control. Since the simultaneous coordination of even tens of
droplets on the array is extremely difficult to program manually, we
are developing modular array layouts and network-style droplet routing
algorithms to automatically enable the flexible coordination of
hundreds of droplets. I will discuss our ongoing work in applying
these algorithms to enable versatile digital microfluidic biochips for
problems in biology.BIO:
Srinivas Akella is with the Computer Science department and Center for
Automation Technologies and Systems at Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute, Troy, New York. He was a Beckman Fellow at the Beckman
Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign, before joining RPI. He received his Ph.D. in
Robotics from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon
University and his B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology,
Madras. He has received the CAREER award from the National Science
Foundation, and was selected as a Rensselaer Faculty Early Research
Career Honoree. His research interests are in developing optimization
and geometric algorithms for applications in robotics, automation,
microsystems, and biotechnology.

Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 406

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: CS Colloquia