Events Calendar

RASC Seminar: Sanjiv Singh (CMU) - Flying Cars: What's taking so long?

Speaker: Sanjiv Singh, CMU

Talk Title: Flying Cars: What's taking so long?

Series: RASC Seminar Series

Abstract: Almost a hundred years ago, before we had foreseen a world where cars drive themselves in traffic, the idea of a vehicle that could be both driven and flown had already taken hold of the public imagination. However compelling the imagery facilitated by the media and science fiction, we are still not close to an aerial analog of the self-driving car. While commonplace flying cars might be some time in coming, we might still ask what would be possible if we could realize "personal aviation". We could ask how such vehicles could operate safely and what steps we need to take to hasten their feasibility.

Because flying cars would almost certainly have to be autonomous to be operable by non-pilots, many of the
building blocks needed have immediate relevance in the agenda for developing autonomous drones, as well as,
safety aids for pilots of the large number of aircraft that must fly at low elevation and land at unprepared sites.

In my talk, I will discuss results from recent work with autonomous aircraft operating in unstructured environments
focused on four technical goals: fly safe, land safe, fly without GPS, and, even when critical systems fail. I will
show how presence of a human onboard an autonomous flying vehicle can improve both performance and reliability.
I also will show results from a new class of methods that simultaneously produce dense reconstruction and
low-drift 6DOF pose estimation in real time, with application to various scales of aircraft.


Biography: Sanjiv Singh is a Research Professor at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University and the CEO of
Near Earth Autonomy. He started his career working on the earliest autonomous ground vehicles to operate
outdoors in 1985. Since then, he has led research efforts with applications in aviation, agriculture, mining and
construction. In 2010 he led a team that demonstrated the first autonomous, full-scale helicopter capable of
take off, search for viable landing sites and safe descent. He holds a Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon
University and is the founding editor of the Journal of Field Robotics.



Host: Gaurav Sukhatme

Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 406

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Assistant to CS chair