Events Calendar

CS Colloquium: Sachin Patil (UC Berkeley) -Coping with Uncertainty in Robotic Navigation, Exploration, and Grasping

Speaker: Sachin Patil , UC Berkeley

Talk Title: Coping with Uncertainty in Robotic Navigation, Exploration, and Grasping

Series: CS Colloquium

Abstract: A key challenge in robotics is to robustly complete navigation, exploration, and manipulation tasks when the state of the world is uncertain. This is a fundamental problem in several application areas such as logistics, personal robotics, and healthcare where robots with imprecise actuation and sensing are being deployed in unstructured environments. In such a setting, it is necessary to reason about the acquisition of perceptual knowledge and to perform information gathering actions as necessary. In this talk, I will present an approach to motion planning under motion and sensing uncertainty called "belief space" planning where the objective is to trade off exploration (gathering information) and exploitation (performing actions) in the context of performing a task. In particular, I will present how we can use trajectory optimization to compute locally-optimal solutions to a determinized version of this problem in Gaussian belief spaces. I will show that it is possible to obtain significant computational speedups without explicitly optimizing over the covariances by considering a partial collocation approach. I will also address the problem of computing such trajectories, given that measurements may not be obtained during execution due to factors such as limited field of view of sensors and occlusions. I will demonstrate this approach in the context of robotic grasping in unknown environments where the robot has to simultaneously explore the environment and grasp occluded objects whose geometry and positions are initially unknown.

Biography: Sachin Patil is a postdoctoral researcher working with Prof. Pieter Abbeel and Prof. Ken Goldberg at the University of California at Berkeley. He previously completed his PhD with Prof. Ron Alterovitz at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on developing rigorous motion planning algorithms to enable new, minimally invasive medical procedures and to facilitate reliable operation of robots in unstructured environments.

Host: Gaurav Sukhatme

Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Assistant to CS chair