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Abstract In a COPSS-NISS webinar focused on leadership at the intersection of statistics and genomics, esteemed panelists Drs. Rafael Irizarry and Mingyao Li shared their leadership journeys and provided insights into this interdisciplinary field to inspire future leaders. They discussed the value of statistics in distinguishing signal from noise in the artificial intelligence (AI) era, the strengths of statisticians in ensuring rigor and robustness in genomics research, and the trade-offs between model expressiveness and interpretability. Additionally, they offered advice on how junior faculty can seek collaborations and increase their visibility, balance staying current with technological advancements, while developing methods carefully and thoroughly, and best practices for collaborating with domain experts. The recording of the webinar is available athttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6SsAoh95ig.
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Adaptive ergodic search with energy-aware scheduling for persistent multi-robot missions
Abstract Autonomous robots are increasingly deployed for long-term information-gathering tasks, which pose two key challenges: planning informative trajectories in environments that evolve across space and time, and ensuring persistent operation under energy constraints. This paper presents a unified framework, , that addresses both challenges through adaptive ergodic search and energy-aware scheduling in multi-robot systems. Our contributions are two-fold: (1) we model real-world variability using stochastic spatiotemporal environments, where the underlying information evolves continuously over space and time under process noise. To guide exploration, we construct a target information spatial distribution (TISD) based on clarity, a metric that captures the decay of information in the absence of observations and highlights regions of high uncertainty; and (2) we introduce ( ), an online scheduling method that enables persistent operation by coordinating rechargeable robots sharing a single mobile charging station. Unlike prior work, our approach avoids reliance on preplanned schedules, static or dedicated charging stations, and simplified robot dynamics. Instead, the scheduler supports general nonlinear models, accounts for uncertainty in the estimated position of the charging station, and handles central node failures. The proposed framework is validated through real-world hardware experiments, and feasibility guarantees are provided under specific assumptions.[Code: https://github.com/kalebbennaveed/mEclares-main.git][Experiment Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmaZDvxJgF8]
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- PAR ID:
- 10639710
- Publisher / Repository:
- Springer
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Autonomous Robots
- Volume:
- 49
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 0929-5593
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-025-10215-6
