Events Calendar

CS Colloquium and RASC seminar: Ali Agha (Caltech, JPL) - Quantifiably safe robot motion planning under motion and sensing uncertainty

Speaker: Ali Agha, Caltech, JPL

Talk Title: Quantifiably safe robot motion planning under motion and sensing uncertainty

Series: RASC Seminar Series

Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium.

Planning robot motions amidst obstacles, while actively enhancing localization, is a key component for true autonomy. With a growing number of autonomous robots and safety-critical applications, it is of paramount importance to design planners with the ability to guarantee and quantify the system's safety. In this talk, we explore planning methods that reason about the acquisition of future perceptual knowledge and incorporate this knowledge in planning to accurately quantify the success probability and safety of the plan. In particular, I present a planning framework under motion and sensing uncertainty, called Feedback-based Information RoadMap (FIRM). FIRM is a multi-query graph in belief space (space of probability distributions), which can be viewed as the belief space variant of the celebrated PRM (probabilistic roadmap). Each node of FIRM is a belief. Each edge (belief-to-belief transition) is realized via composition of closed-loop controllers that behave like funnels in belief space. We also discuss the feedback nature and scalability of the generated plan. We will demonstrate this approach in the context of robot navigation in indoor GPS-denied environments.

Biography: Ali-Akbar Agha-Mohammadi is a Robotics Research Technologist at NASA JPL/California Institute of Technology. Previously, he was a research engineer at Qualcomm Research and a post-doctoral researcher at LIDS/ACL at MIT. He has received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from Texas A&M. He also holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering (Control Systems). His research interests include robotics, stochastic systems, control systems, estimation, and filtering theory.


Host: CS Department

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

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Assistant to CS chair