Refreshments are available starting at 10:30 a.m. The seminar will begin at 10:45 a.m.
Abstract
In the last few decades, most robotics success stories have been limited to structured or controlled environments. A major challenge is to develop robot systems that can operate in complex or unstructured environments corresponding to homes, dense traffic, outdoor terrains, public places, etc. In this talk, Dinesh Manocha gives an overview of his ongoing work on developing robust planning and navigation technologies that use recent advances in computer vision, sensor technologies, machine learning, and motion planning algorithms. He presents new methods that utilize multimodal observations from an RGB camera, 3D LiDAR, and robot odometry for scene perception, along with deep reinforcement learning for reliable planning; the latter is also used to compute dynamically feasible and spatially aware velocities for a robot navigating among mobile obstacles and uneven terrains. These methods have been integrated with wheeled robots, home robots, and legged platforms and their performance has been highlighted in crowded indoor scenes, home environments, and dense outdoor terrains.
Speaker Biography
Dinesh Manocha is the Paul Chrisman Iribe Professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering and a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research interests include virtual environments, physically based modeling, and robotics. His group has developed a number of software packages that are standard and licensed to 60+ commercial vendors. He has published more than 750 papers and supervised 50 PhD dissertations. He is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the ACM, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the National Academy of Inventors. He is also a member of the ACM’s Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques and the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Community’s Virtual Reality Academy. Manocha is the recipient of a Pierre Bézier Award from the Solid Modeling Association, a Distinguished Alumni Award from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, and a Distinguished Career Award in Computer Science from the Washington Academy of Sciences. He was also a co-founder of Impulsonic, a developer of physics-based audio simulation technologies that was acquired by Valve Corporation in November of 2016.