Interactive Autonomy: Learning and Control for Multi-agent Interactions

Negahr Mehr

Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of California at Berkeley

Location: Gates B3 (link)

Attendance Link: https://tinyurl.com/robosem-spr-2026

Abstract

To truly transform our lives, autonomous systems must operate in complex environments shared with other agents. For instance, delivery robots need to move through spaces that are shared with humans, and warehouse robots must coordinate in shared factory floors. Such multi-agent settings demand systematic methods that enable efficient and reliable interactions among agents. In the first part of my talk, I focus on control challenges in such domains and will discuss game-theoretic planning and control for robots. Intelligent interaction requires robots to reason about how their decisions affect and are affected by others. I will present our recent results showing how exploiting structural properties of interactions leads to motion planning algorithms that are both efficient and tractbale for real-time deployment. The second part of the talk will focus on learning in interactive domains, including imitation learning and reinforcement learning. While these approaches have advanced significantly in single-agent settings, multi-agent domains present unique learning challenges because decisions are tightly coupled across agents. I will highlight how some of these challenges can be addressed to make learning feasible in interactive multi-agent domains.

Bio: 

I am an assistant professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of California at Berkeley. I run the ICON Lab. The focus of my research is to develop control algorithms that allow autonomous systems to safely and intelligently interact with each other and with humans. I draw from the fields of control theory, robotics, game theory, and machine learning. I was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford from 2019 to 2020. I received my PhD in Mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley in 2019 and received my bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering at Sharif University of Technology in 2013.