Robotics Seminar: Negar Mehr

On October 8, 2025, Negar Mehr presented “Interactive Autonomy: Learning and Control for Multi-agent Interactions” as part of the Michigan Robotics Seminar Series.

Abstract
To truly transform our lives, autonomous systems must operate in complex environments shared with other agents. For instance, delivery drones must navigate crowded airspaces, and warehouse robots must coordinate in shared factory floors. Such multi-agent settings demand systematic methods that enable efficient and reliable interactions across applications. 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 suitable for real-time deployment on hardware. 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
Negar Mehr is an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Before that, she was an assistant professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford Aeronautics and Astronautics department from 2019 to 2020. She received her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley in 2019 and her B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 2013. She is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award. She has been recognized as a rising star by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). She was awarded the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems best Ph.D. dissertation award in 2020.

More:
Michigan Robotics Seminar Series: https://robotics.umich.edu/events/rob...
Negar Mehr: https://negarmehr.com/