Aerospace Engineering Seminar

Interest in autonomous multi-agent systems has heated up in the applied research community, with US government institutions such as NASA, NOAA, and the Department of Defense (DoD) investing to understand how to apply cooperative robot teams and to develop the technologies needed for real-world systems. This talk will provide an overview of JPL technology development activities that support such missions in two parts.

First, the talk will briefly share a vision for potential NASA multi-agent missions, such as spacecraft constellations, networked planetary observers, and orbiting distributed apertures.

Second, it will discuss how JPL has developed NASA-relevant technology in the context of autonomous marine vehicles, an application that has served as a proving ground for new approaches in multi-agent coordination, multi-mission software architectures, robot motion planning, and vision-based perception.