From Coordination to Collaboration in Multi-Robot Systems: Lessons from Ecology

A standard approach to multi-robot systems is to divide the team-level tasks into suitable building blocks and have the robots solve their respective subtasks in a coordinated manner. However, by bringing together robots of different types, it should be possible to arrive at completely new capabilities and skill sets. In other words, the whole could become greater than the sum of its parts. Inspired by the ecological concept of mutualism, i.e., the interaction between two or more species that benefit everyone involved, this idea is formalized through the composition of barrier functions for encoding collaborative arrangements in terms of expansions and contractions of relevant sets. Contextualized in a long-duration setting for robots deployed over long time scales, where optimality has to take a backseat to “survivability”, example scenarios include robotic environmental monitoring, safe learning, and remote access in the Robotarium, which is a multi-robot lab that has been in (almost) continuous operation for over five years.

Dr. Magnus Egerstedt

Stacey Nicholas Dean of Engineering, University of California Irvine on October 16, 2025 at 3:00 PM in BTEC building, Room BTC-123

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 several 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.

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