HSCC Keynote

We are pleased to announce that the keynote speaker for HSCC’25 will be Magnus Egerstedt from University of California, Irvine.

Title
Composition of Constraints in Long Duration Autonomy

Abstract
When robots are to be deployed over long time scales, optimality should take a backseat to “survivability”. In other words, it is more important that the robots do not experience mission-ending failures, such as collisions or complete depletion of their energy sources, rather than that they perform certain tasks as effectively as possible. For example, in the context of multi-agent robotics, we have a fairly good understanding of how to design coordinated control strategies for making teams of mobile robots achieve geometric objectives, such as assembling shapes or covering areas. But, what happens when these geometric objectives no longer matter all that much? In this talk, we consider this question of long duration autonomy for teams of robots that are deployed in an environment over a sustained period of time and that can be recruited to perform a number of different tasks in a distributed, safe, and provably correct manner. Survival will be encoded through Boolean composition of barrier functions. But, as these operations are non-differentiable, a non-smooth barrier function machinery is needed to manage the resulting complex, hybrid system dynamics.

Short Bio
Dr. Magnus Egerstedt is the Stacey Nicholas Dean of Engineering in the Samueli School of Engineering and a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. Prior to joining UCI, Egerstedt was on the faculty at the Georgia Institute of Technology, serving as the School Chair in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Director of Georgia Tech’s Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines. He received the M.S. degree in Engineering Physics and the Ph.D. degree in Applied Mathematics from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, the B.A. degree in Philosophy from Stockholm University, and was a Postdoctoral Scholar at Harvard University. Dr. Egerstedt conducts research in the areas of control theory and robotics, with particular focus on control and coordination of multi-robot systems. Magnus Egerstedt is a Fellow of IEEE and IFAC, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Science, and a past president of the IEEE Control Systems Society. He has received a number of teaching and research awards, including the Ragazzini Award from the American Automatic Control Council, the O. Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award from the American Control Conference, and the Alumni of the Year Award from the Royal Institute of Technology.