Special Talk
Special Talk: Building Robots For Long-Term Autonomy, And Keeping Them Autonomous
Abstract: We seek the ultimate goal of having self-sufficient autonomous service mobile robots working in human environments, performing tasks accurately and robustly. Successfully deploying such robots requires simultaneously addressing challenges in a number of subproblems spanning the complete perception-cognition-actuation stack. In this talk, I shall present our recent research along two broad themes: algorithms for [...]
Speaker: Jia Deng
Areas of Interest: Artificial Intelligence, vision, knowledge, reasoning Host: Abhinav Gupta Admin Contact: Chris Downey cdowney@andrew.cmu.edu
Fully Autonomous Drones for Wind Power Turbine Inspection
Abstract: The wind energy industry is growing rapidly. In the U.S. alone, the wind industry invested more than $11 billion in new plants in 2017 and added more than 7,000 megawatts of new capacity, representing 25% of all electric capacity added. One of the biggest challenges to growth remains the high costs of constructing wind [...]
Human-guided Task Transfer for Interactive Robots
Abstract: Adaptability is an essential skill in human cognition, enabling us to draw from our extensive, life-long experiences with various objects and tasks in order to address novel problems. To date, most robots do not have this kind of adaptability, and yet, as our expectations of robots’ interactive and assistive capacity grows, it will be [...]
Numerical Methods for Things That Move: From Quadrupeds to Starships
Abstract: Recent advances in motion planning and control have led to dramatic successes like SpaceX’s rocket landings and Boston Dynamics’ humanoid robot acrobatics. However, the underlying numerical methods used in these applications are typically decades old, not tuned for high performance on planning and control problems, and are often unable to cope with the types [...]
Five Traps for Robots in Human Environments….And How to Avoid Them
Abstract: Robotics today is moving beyond fixed environments and into human spaces like homes, restaurants, and hospitals. In these new spaces, robots will necessarily have to interact with people. In some sense, every recent robotics problem is partly a human-robot interaction problem. Thus, the field of HRI can offer insights to the broader robotics community [...]
Making AI trustworthy and understandable by clinicians
Abstract: Understandable-AI techniques facilitate to use of AI as a tool by human experts, giving humans insight into how AI decisions are made thereby helping experts discern which AI predictions should or shouldn’t be trusted. Understandable techniques may be especially useful for applications with insufficient validation data for regulatory approval, for which human experts must remain the final decision [...]
Perceiving Objects and Interactions in 3D
Abstract: We observe and interact with myriad of objects in our everyday lives, from cups and bottles to hammers and tennis rackets. In this talk, I will outline our group’s efforts towards understanding these objects and our everyday interactions with them in 3D. I will first focus on scaling 3D prediction for isolated objects across [...]
Special RI Seminar
Title: Testing, Analysis, and Specification for Robust and Reliable Robot Software Abstract: Building robust and reliable robotic software is an inherently challenging feat that requires substantial expertise across a variety of disciplines. Despite that, writing robot software has never been easier thanks to software frameworks such as ROS: At its best, ROS allows newcomers to assemble simple, [...]
Composable Optimization for Robotic Motion Planning and Control
Abstract: Contact interactions are pervasive in real-world robotics tasks like manipulation and walking. However, the non-smooth dynamics associated with impacts and friction remain challenging to model, and motion planning and control algorithms that can fluently and efficiently reason about contact remain elusive. In this talk, I will share recent work from my research group that takes an “optimization-first” [...]