Invited Speakers

Talk Title: The Unmeasured River of Geology and Biology Aloft: Observation Needs

Dr. Jonathan Stock founded and runs the USGS National Innovation Center (NIC). The Center’s goal is to identify national scientific challenges, and to pursue them with technology partners using scarce federal dollars to best serve the public. NIC partners with industry, non-governmental organizations, other Federal Agencies and academia to improve the Nation’s ability to map, monitor and forecast its resources and hazards. Stock holds degrees from University of California, Santa Cruz, University of Washington, and University of California, Berkeley. The Center is located at the U.S. Geological Survey in Moffett Field, California, USA.

Talk title: Communications challenges in the Extensible Traffic Management domain

Dr. Jaewoo Jung is an Aerospace Technologist at NASA. He has worked on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Traffic Management (UTM) as a researcher and later as a project manager. Currently, he is leading Extensible Traffic Management (xTM), a sub-project of NASA’s Air Traffic Management eXploration (ATM-X) project, coordinating and collaborating with NASA internal and external partners such as the FAA and upper Class E operators to mature and expand the xTM framework.

Talk Title: Optimizing cooperation through opportunistic communication

Dr. Ankur Mehta: Now, this is a story all about how

My life took me to where I am now

And I'd like to take a minute, just sit right there

I'll tell you how I became a prof at UCLA.

From Pennsylvania born and raised

MIT is where I spent the next of my days

Getting my Masters and Bachelor's too

Double-E is the field I did then pursue.

Then a couple of years until I finally would

From California, Berkeley get my doctor hood

I got in one lil' postdoc at MIT CSAIL

And then I moved to LA just south of Bel Air.

Talk Title: Multi-robot Exploration in Subterranean Environments

Prof. Jan Faigl founded and is leading the Computational Robotics Laboratory (http://comrob.fel.cvut.cz) within the Artificial Intelligence Center (http://aic.fel.cvut.cz) and the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague. He is also co-founder of the Center for Robotics and Autonomous Systems (http://robotics.fel.cvut.cz). He participated in the DARPA SubT Challenge as a member of the CTU-CRAS-NORLAB team that took 1st place in DARPA non-funded teams and 3rd place among all the teams in Tunnel and Urban Circuits, and 2nd in the Virtual Track of the DARPA SubT Finals in 2021. His research interests include multi-goal planning, robotic information gathering, robotic systems for autonomous long-term missions with life-long learning, multi-robot coordination in communications denied environments, and locomotion control of multi-legged walking robots.