About Me
I am currently an Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering in the School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy at Arizona State University.
From June 2010 to May 2012, I was a postdoctoral researcher in Computer Science at Harvard University, where I worked on the Colony aspect of the RoboBees project and my advisor was Prof. Radhika Nagpal. I received a Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics in May 2010 from the University of Pennsylvania, where I was a member of the GRASP Laboratory. My doctoral advisor was Prof. Vijay Kumar. I received a B.S.E. degree in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University in 2005.
Research Interests
My research focuses on the development of swarm robotic systems with theoretical guarantees on performance. These systems consist of hundreds or thousands of autonomous robots with limited capabilities, and they are suitable for applications that require massive parallelism, redundancy, and adaptation to dynamic, possibly hazardous environments. I study natural swarms such as social insect colonies as sources of inspiration for engineered swarm behaviors.
The diagram below illustrates my approach to modeling and analyzing swarm performance and designing robot controllers that produce a desired collective behavior and are scalable, meaning that they ensure this behavior regardless of the swarm size. The approach applies to systems in which robots display a combination of inherent and intentional stochasticity in their motion and transitions between tasks. The fundamental idea is to abstract the physical swarm to a continuous model that governs the expected time evolution of swarm subpopulations, then apply analysis, optimization, and control synthesis techniques to this model, and finally use the modified model parameters to define robot control policies. I have applied this approach to the design of (1) swarm task allocation strategies that do not use inter-robot communication, (2) a swarm robotic manufacturing system, and (3) a commercial pollination scenario with micro air vehicles.
I have also investigated ant-inspired strategies for multi-robot collective transport without the use of inter-robot communication or a priori knowledge about the payload or obstacles in the environment.
Publications
Journal Papers and Book Chapters
Experimental Study and Modeling of Group Retrieval in Ants as an Approach to Collective Transport in
Swarm Robotic Systems
Spring Berman, Quentin Lindsey, Mahmut Selman Sakar, Vijay Kumar, and Stephen Pratt.
Proceedings of the IEEE, Special Issue on Swarming in Natural and Engineered Systems, 2011.
Optimized Stochastic Policies for Task Allocation in Swarms of Robots
Spring Berman, Adam Halasz, M. Ani Hsieh, and Vijay Kumar.
IEEE Transactions on Robotics, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 927-937, 2009.
Biologically Inspired Redistribution of a Swarm of Robots Among Multiple Sites
M. Ani Hsieh, Adam Halasz, Spring Berman, and Vijay Kumar.
Swarm Intelligence, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 121-141, 2008.
Ant-Inspired Allocation: Top-Down Controller Design for Distributing a Robot Swarm among Multiple Tasks
Spring Berman, Adam Halasz, and M. Ani Hsieh.
Bio-inspired Computing and Networking, ed. Yang Xiao, CRC Press, New York, 2011.
Refereed Conference Papers
A Stochastic Hybrid System Model
of Collective Transport in the Desert Ant Aphaenogaster cockerelli
Ganesh Kumar, Aurelie Buffin, Theodore Pavlic, Stephen Pratt, and Spring Berman.
Accepted to the International Conference on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control (HSCC), Philadelphia, PA, 2013.
A Comparison of Deterministic and Stochastic Approaches for Allocating Spatially Dependent Tasks in Micro-Aerial Vehicle Collectives
Karthik Dantu, Spring Berman, Bryan Kate, and Radhika Nagpal.
2012 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS'12), Vilamoura, Algarve, Portugal.
Optimization of Stochastic Strategies for Spatially Inhomogeneous Robot Swarms: A Case Study in Commercial Pollination
Spring Berman, Radhika Nagpal, and Adam Halasz.
2011 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS'11), San Francisco, CA.
Design of Control Policies for Spatially Inhomogeneous Robot Swarms
with Application to Commercial Pollination
Spring Berman, Vijay Kumar, and Radhika Nagpal.
2011 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA'11), Shanghai, China.
Study of Group Food Retrieval by Ants as a Model for
Multi-Robot Collective Transport Strategies
Spring Berman, Quentin Lindsey, Mahmut Selman Sakar, Vijay Kumar, and Stephen Pratt.
Proceedings of the 2010 Robotics: Science and Systems Conference (RSS'10), Zaragoza, Spain.
Stochastic Strategies for a Swarm Robotic Assembly System
Loic Matthey, Spring Berman, and Vijay Kumar.
Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA'09), Kobe, Japan, pp. 1953-1958.
Navigation-Based Optimization of Stochastic Strategies for Allocating a Robot Swarm among Multiple Sites
Spring Berman, Adam Halasz, M. Ani Hsieh, and Vijay Kumar.
Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC'08), Cancun, Mexico, pp. 4376-4381.
Dynamic Redistribution of a Swarm of Robots Among Multiple Sites
Adam Halasz, M. Ani Hsieh, Spring Berman, and Vijay Kumar.
Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS'07), San Diego, CA, pp. 2320-2325.
Bio-Inspired Group Behaviors for the Deployment of a Swarm of Robots to Multiple Destinations
Spring Berman, Adam Halasz, Vijay Kumar, and Stephen Pratt.
Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA'07), Rome, Italy, pp. 2318-2323.
MARCO: A Reachability Algorithm for Multi-Affine Systems with Applications to Biological Systems
Spring Berman, Adam Halasz, and Vijay Kumar.
International Conference on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control (HSCC'07). LNCS 4416, eds. A. Bemporad, A. Bicchi, G. Buttazzo, pp. 76-89, 2007.
Algorithms for the Analysis and Synthesis of a Bio-Inspired Swarm Robotic System
Spring Berman, Adam Halasz, Vijay Kumar, and Stephen Pratt.
International Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB'06). LNCS 4433, eds. E. Sahin, W. Spears, A. Winfield, pp. 56-70, 2007.
Invited Conference Papers
Abstractions and Algorithms for Assembly Tasks with Large Numbers of Robots and Parts
Spring Berman and Vijay Kumar.
Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE'09), Bangalore, India.
Dissertation
Abstractions, Analysis Techniques, and Synthesis of Scalable Control
Strategies for Robot Swarms
Spring Berman.
Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, University of Pennsylvania, 2010.
Teaching
Teaching Assistant
Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics Department, University of Pennsylvania- Fall 2006: MEAM 321 - Vibrations of Mechanical Systems
- Spring 2007: MEAM 211 - Engineering Mechanics: Dynamics
- Fall 2007: MEAM 110 - Introduction to Mechanics
Support
- National Science Foundation Expeditions in Computing: RoboBees Project (2010-2012)
- National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship (2005-2007)
- National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (2007-2010)
- University of Pennsylvania Ashton Scholarship