Upcoming Events
Next Robotics Research Colloquium
Tuesday, March 31th, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM, EERC 227
Title: "Coordinating Heterogeneous Harvesting Robots Under Real-World Constraints with Heuristic and LLM-based Approaches"
Presenter: Hyeseon Lee
Abstract:
Small farms are facing a growing challenge: acute labor shortages and limited access to specialized machinery. While robots offer a promising solution, coordinating robotic teams in real-world environments becomes a challenging routing problem. For example, robots must navigate rows of varying sizes, manage limited battery life, and unload harvested crops while working together despite having different capabilities. This talk will explore how to coordinate heterogeneous robotic teams under these realistic constraints. The work develops optimization methods, efficient greedy algorithms, and a new approach using Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate solutions directly from high-level descriptions. The results demonstrate a key trade-off between efficiency and adaptability, and highlight the emerging role of LLMs as flexible tools for real-world robotic coordination. While oriented toward agricultural applications, this work extends to broader heterogeneous multi-robot systems.
Past
The Robotics Initiative rollout and information session took place on January 26th, with an attending crowd much larger than predicted!
Several presenters, including initiative leader Dr. Jung Yun Bae, shared information and their research during the hour. Click the link below to check out the presented slides!
Previous Colloquium Presenters