Title: Bio-inspired Approach for Multitask Allocation Problem in Unmanned Ariel Vehicles

Speaker: Dr.Heba Kurdi, PhD  | Assistant Professor of Wireless Networks and Communication Engineering at King Saud University.

Synopsis:

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), which are aircrafts with no pilot on board, are increasingly attracting attention; they are capable of performing a wide range of missions that are considered dull and dangerous for humans. For instance, in emergency situations, such as natural disasters, finding and rescuing potential survivors can be carried out by a group of  autonomous UAVs, which cooperate with each other in the destroyed environment that manned vehicles and humans cannot reach or have difficulty reaching.

With the growing focus on multi-UAV, multi-UAV task allocation (MUTA) is attracting a significant attention. Actually, in the field of Search and Rescue (SAR) missions of UAVs, the main challenge facing researchers is to decide how to best allocate multi-UAV between rescue and search tasks to fulfill the urgent need of finding and rescuing people within a certain time frame.  This problem increases in complexity as the numbers of UAVS and tasks increase and it is classified among NP-hard problems.

Dr. Kurdi is working with Professor Jonathon How, from the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department at MIT, to develop bio-inspired techniques that enable  multi-UAV systems to act autonomously and execute SAR missions within predefined time constraints. The main idea of the proposed algorithms is to have the UAVs dynamically changing their roles, to mimic some biological species, based on situational awareness.

Dr. Heba Kurdi:

Dr. Heba Kurdi is Assistant Professor of Wireless Networks and Communication Engineering at King Saud University. She completed her PhD from Brunel University’s School of Engineering and Design (London, UK) in 2010 achieving the Shield of Distinguished Research from the Saudi Ambassador in the UK and Ireland.

Inspired by the wisdom of the Honeybee Colony, Dr. Kurdi developed a new computing environment, Personal Mobile Grids, and became the first Saudi female to receive a US patent in the area of Information and Communication Technologies. Dr. Kurdi has had dozens of journal and conference publications and received the Best Paper Award in London's 2012 Science and Technology Conference sponsored by Springer and IEEE. Dr. Kurdi works as a reviewer for several journals and is a principal investigator and project manager on several research projects. Her research interests include Bio-inspired Engineering, Multi Agent Systems, Distributed Systems, Wireless networks and Mobile Computing.

Dr. Kurdi has been working in academia for the past ten years, where she played different roles including vice chair of the department of Computer Sciences, vice dean of the College of Computer and Information Sciences and vice dean of the Career and Entrepreneurship Centre.  These different positions and rich experiences have given her strong academic, managerial and leadership skills.

Date/Time: Tuesday, November 3, 2015 at 12:00pm

Location: Maria Auditorium, F50 in Building 6  - Broadcast to Room 2084 in CCIS Building 31.

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