Graduate Seminar Series - Dr. Xi Yu

Xi Yu, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor at Arizona State University

Friday, October 9th, 2026, 3:00 - 4:00 PM
Jett Hall, room 109

Title: Seminar Title: Sailing with Uncertainty: Multi-Robot Networks in Underwater Environments

ABSTRACT: Autonomous underwater technologies are urgently needed for tasks in dynamic, hostile environments that require solutions capable of operating persistently for long durations. As underwater missions become more complex, teams of robots can work more efficiently than a single vehicle and add new capabilities through cooperation, coordination, and collaboration. Individual robots in a multi-robot team interact not only with the ocean environment but also with one another, enabling them to jointly synthesize collective strategies that are ideally robust, resilient, and secure. In practice, the networks formed by these interactions are rarely consistent or well-structured. Robots can leverage their mobility to regenerate connections when existing ones fail, generating time-varying networks in which links emerge, degrade, disappear, and reappear over time. Underwater dynamics may cause irregular vehicle motion through currents and drift, while acoustic attenuation, multipath, delayed communication, limited sensing, and the absence of GPS introduce randomness in the synthesis, timing, and quality of temporal links. Such stochastic networks challenge classical graph-theoretic tools and require that connectivity be understood not only as an abstract graph property but also as a physical resource that must be maintained under sensing, communication, actuation, and environmental constraints. This talk introduces multi-robot networks in underwater environments, examples of stochastic, time-varying connectivity, and control methods designed to support coordination that is not only theoretically connected but also maintainable in practice beneath the waves.

BIO:

Xi Yu is an Assistant Professor in the School of Manufacturing Systems and Networks at Arizona State University. She earned her B.S. and Dipl.-Ing. in mechanical engineering from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), followed by a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Boston University in 2018. She then completed a postdoctoral appointment at the GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, before joining West Virginia University in 2021 as an Assistant Professor in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. In 2024, she joined Arizona State University, where she currently holds her faculty position.

Her research explores how teams of robots with limited actuation, sensing, and communication capabilities can operate in challenging environments, including large-scale settings marked by intrinsic dynamics, uncertainty, or hazard. Through this work, she seeks to advance the understanding of time-varying, stochastic networks synthesized by multi-robot teams. She is a member of the IEEE Control Systems Society and the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.