Event Location: 1305 Newell Simon Hall
Bio: Edwin Olson is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan
with research interests in robot autonomy, perception, and learning.
In 2010, he led Team Michigan to first place in the MAGIC 2010
robotics competition. He received his PhD, M.Eng., and B.S. from MIT,
where he was also a core member of MIT’s DARPA Urban Challenge team.

Abstract: The MAGIC 2010 competition asked teams of robots to collaboratively
perform reconnaissance missions in a 250,000m2 urban indoor/outdoor
environment: explore the area, build a map, and recognize interesting
objects— with as little human intervention as possible. In this
talk, I’ll describe how our team of 14 robots won the competition and
$750,000. Central challenges included inaccurate dead-reckoning
information, limited communications, moving and lethal obstacles, and
a scale of operation (environment size and number of robots) that
pushed existing mapping algorithms to failure. Key to our systems’
success was our ability to maintain a consistent coordinate frame and
theability to elicit critically useful information from the human
operators while simultaneously minimizing their workload. In addition
to showing cases where our system performed well, I’ll describe some
of the failure modes that motivate our ongoing work.