Dr. Trung Dung Ngo, a candidate for a tenure track position in Engineering will be giving a public presentation on Thursday, July 31 at 2:00 pm in Don and Marion McDougall Hall, Room 246. Everyone is welcome to attend. Dr. Ngo's presentation is entitled "A Kangaroo inspired Robotic System as the First Responders for Search and Rescue in Hazardous Environments." Abstract: It is very risky for fire fighters to search for and rescue victims in collapsed buildings. The risk can be minimized if they know what is happening inside the building prior to carrying out their mission with the old-fashioned technology they have used for last 50 years. In this talk, I will present a kangaroo inspired robotic system which functions as a team of the first responders for fire fighters. The heterogeneous robotic system consists of a kangaroo marsupial robot and juvenile robots that can be quickly deployed and dispersed for cooperative exploration and coverage, and victim identification. The robots can self-organize an ad-hoc communication network to transmit environmental exploited data from the juvenile robots to fire fighters. I will discuss the key characteristics of this system in terms of typical features of complex systems through simulation results. Finally, I will demonstrate the viability of the concept through real-world experiments.