Magnus Egerstedt


Magnus B. Egerstedt is a Swedish-American roboticist, the Steve C. Chaddick School Chair and Professor at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology.
Egerstedt is a major contributor to the theory of hybrid and discrete event systems, and in particular, the control of multi-agent systems.

Biography

Education

Magnus Egerstedt was born in Täby Municipality, Stockholm, Sweden in 1971. He received his B.A. from Stockholm University in Theoretical Philosophy in 1996, specializing in language philosophy and with a thesis titled Implicit Knowledge and Public Mathematical Meaning, while simultaneously attending the Royal Institute of Technology, where he received in 1996 an M.S. in Engineering Physics. During this period, Egerstedt visited Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas and completed his M.S. thesis A Model of the Combined Planar Motion of the Human Head and Eye. In 2000, Egerstedt completed a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics under the advisement of Xiaoming Hu and Anders Lindquist for the thesis Motion Planning and Control of Mobile Robots. At KTH, Egerstedt was affiliated with the Center for Autonomous Systems.

Career

In 1998, Egerstedt was a Visiting Scholar at the Robotics Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley where he collaborated with Shankar S. Sastry on the hybrid control of mobile robotics. From 2000 to 2001, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow under Roger W. Brockett at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, focusing on formal methods for robot control.
Egerstedt joined the Georgia Institute of Technology as a faculty member in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2001, where he has held the positions of Schlumberger Professor, Julian T. Hightower Chair in Systems and Controls, and Associate Chair for Research. In August 2018, he was appointed as the Steve W. Chaddick School Chair of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Egerstedt is also holds adjunct appointments in the School of Interactive Computing, the Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, and the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
In 2016, Egerstedt was named the Executive Director of the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines, a position he held for two years. In 2017, Egerstedt launched the Robotarium, a swarm-robotic research testbed whose goal is to provide access to a state-of-the-art test facility to researchers around the globe.

Professional Activities

Egerstedt has earned a number of teaching and research awards and honors during his career:
The School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology is one of the largest producers of electrical engineers and computer engineers in the United States. Over 2,600 students are enrolled in the School’s graduate and undergraduate programs. All ECE undergraduate and graduate programs are in the top five of the most recent college rankings by U.S. News & World Report. In addition to the main campus in Atlanta, Georgia, ECE also has permanent operations at Georgia Tech-Lorraine in France and Georgia Tech-Shenzhen in China.

The Robotarium

The Robotarium is a remotely accessible swarm robotics testbed designed and developed by Magnus Egerstedt at Georgia Tech. The Robotarium provides researchers working on swarm robotics access to both ground and aerial robots. Since its launch in August 2017, over 200 research groups from all continents except Antarctica have used the Robotarium.

Georgia Robotics and Intelligent Systems (GRITS) Lab

At Georgia Tech, Magnus Egerstedt is the director of the Georgia Robotics and Intelligent Systems Lab. The research topics of the lab include:
Egerstedt has authored over 400 research papers in the areas of robotics and control, including the books:
Egerstedt has an Erdős number of 3: Magnus B. Egerstedt - Vincent D. Blondel - Harold S. Shapiro - Paul Erdős