Morteza Lahijanian MAD Games Workshop at ICRA 2024

MAD Games workshop on Multi-Agent Dynamic Games at ICRA 2024 was organized by Rahul Mangharam, Hongrui Zheng, Shuo Yang, Johannes Betz and Venkat Krovi. icra2024-madga...
As robots gain capabilities to enter our human-centric world, they require formalism and algorithms that enable smart and efficient interactions. This is challenging especially for robotic manipulators with complex tasks, which often need to deal with interventions by humans. Addressing this issue requires careful consideration of several fundamental questions, e.g., How should interactions be modeled? How can productive interactions be ensured? What strategies guarantee task completion? What assumptions are appropriate for these interactions, and how can computational complexity be managed?
In this talk, I argue that games provide a powerful modeling framework for robotic manipulation. Specifically, to ensure computational tractability, I focus on finite turn-based games and show how such abstractions can be automatically generated for manipulation domains. Then, I discuss three types of games -adversarial, regret, and stochastic- highlighting their significance and the trade-offs involved in assumptions for computational complexity. I show our progress in developing computational frameworks for these games and methods to mitigate their computational bottlenecks.
Bio: Morteza Lahijanian is an assistant professor in the Aerospace Engineering Sciences department, an affiliated faculty at the Computer Science department and Robotics program, and the director of the Assured, Reliable, and Interactive Autonomous (ARIA) Systems group at the University of Colorado Boulder. He received a B.S. in Bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Boston University. He served as a postdoctoral scholar in Computer Science at Rice University. Prior to joining CU Boulder, he was a research scientist in the department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford. His awards include Outstanding Junior Faculty, Ella Mae Lawrence R. Quarles Physical Science Achievement Award, Jack White Engineering Physics Award, NSF GK-12 Fellowship, and Wadham College Research Fellowship. Dr. Lahijanian's research interests span the areas of control theory, stochastic hybrid systems, formal methods, machine learning, and game theory with applications in robotics, particularly, motion planning, strategy synthesis, model checking, and human-robot interaction. His lab develops novel theoretical foundations and computational frameworks to enable reliable and intelligent autonomy. The emphasis is especially on safe autonomy through correct-by-construction algorithmic approaches.