Proejct Title: eXplainable Human-swarm Systems
Duration: 2022-2023
Role: Principle Investigator
Funded by: UKRI Trustworhty Autonomous Systems Hub
Hosted by: University of Southampton, United Kingdom
Summary: A human-swarm teaming can make use of fault-tolerance of the swarm as well as the human critical decision making. Our previous agile project (“Human-swarm Partnership in Extreme Environment”) listed the requirements for trustworthy human-swarm interaction. Based on that, our main goal is to enable the system to assess the criticality of a given situation and decide what needs to be displayed, how, when and why. We will 1) co-design the interface with experienced drone operators (how & when); 2) use probabilistic model checking to verify, predict and explain the behaviour of the swarm (what & why).
Proejct Title: Smart Solutions Towards Cellular-Connected Unmanned Aerial Vehicles System
Duration: 2022-2025
Role: Co-Investigator
Funded by: EPSRC Standard Grant
Hosted by: University of Southampton, United Kingdom
Summary: The goal of this project is to use a swarm of UAVs to create and maintain a reliable cellular-connected network. This project establishes a) novel machine learning (ML)-based radio map prediction and interference mitigation framework over the spatial and frequency domains to combat dynamic air-ground interference; b) devise new ML-based dynamic cross-layer design framework to address the asymmetric uplink/downlink UAV traffic requirements and seamless swarm connectivity under 3D high mobility; c) develop a task and mobility management software platform to organize the swarm with flexible autonomy in a trustworthy manner and d) demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed AI-powered designs and algorithms for C-UAV system via realistic network and control simulator and proof of concept experiments.
Proejct Title: Trustwrothy Human-swarm Partnerships in Extreme Environments
Duration: 2021-2022
Role: Principle Investigator & Research Fellow
Funded by: UKRI Trustworhty Autonomous Systems Hub
Hosted by: University of Southampton, United Kingdom
Summary: The aim of this project is to understand the contextual factors and technical approaches underlying trustworthy human-swarm teams. The project will draw on co-creation with partners and potential users to generate potential use cases and operator-centred requirements. AI-based algorithms will be used to estimate the swarm state and recommend control actions to the human operators in extreme environments. We will evaluate the trustworthiness of our system in a user study with a proof-of-concept HAC simulation and testing platform. The vision is to make our approach broadly applicable in human-swarm use cases, within and beyond the TAS Programme.
Proejct Title: Flexible autonomy for swarm robotics
Duration: 2019-2020
Role: Research Fellow
Funded by: Alan Turing Institute
Hosted by: University of Southampton, United Kingdom
Summary: This project aimed to establish a set of use cases, underpinned by real-world or synthetic datasets. Benchmarking existing solutions within such use-cases, will help to draw out the main research questions that arise when designing, implementing and deploying such human-machine teams.The project involved collaborating with key practitioners from the disaster response domain, with the ambition to develop tools and techniques that will help them carry out aerial surveys and situational awareness missions faster and better. Drawing upon their feedback, this project helped establish the basis for a larger programme of work.
Proejct Title: florarobotica
Duration: 2015-2019
Role: PhD researcher
Funded by: EU-Horizon 2020
Hosted by: University of Paderborn (2015-2017) and University of Lübeck (2017-2019), Germany
Summary: The project’s objective was to develop and investigate closely linked symbiotic relationships between robots and natural plants and to explore the potentials of a plant-robot society able to produce architectural artifacts and living spaces.flora robotica responds to the work-programme theme ‘Knowing, doing and being: cognition beyond problem solving’, the goal of which was to establish new foundations for future robotics and other artificial cognitive systems with clear progress beyond current capabilities and design concepts.The project assembled a highly cross disciplinary team drawn from the fields of Computer Science, Robotics, Molecular and Cellular Biology, Zoology, Advanced Mechatronics & Environmental Sensing and Architecture.
Mohammad D. Soorati | 2022