Events Calendar

ECE Seminar: Collaborative Perception and Learning Between Robots and the Cloud

Speaker: Sandeep Chinchali, PhD Candidate, Dept of CS, Stanford University

Talk Title: Collaborative Perception and Learning Between Robots and the Cloud

Abstract: Augmenting robotic intelligence with cloud connectivity is considered one of the most promising solutions to cope with growing volumes of rich robotic sensory data and increasingly complex perception and decision-making tasks. While the benefits of cloud robotics have been envisioned long before, there is still a lack of flexible methods to trade-off the benefits of cloud computing with end-to-end systems costs of network delay, cloud storage, human annotation time, and cloud-computing time. To address this need, I will introduce decision-theoretic algorithms that allow robots to significantly transcend their on-board perception capabilities by using cloud computing, but in a low-cost, fault-tolerant manner.

Specifically, for compute-and-power-limited robots, I will present a lightweight model selection algorithm that learns when a robot should exploit low-latency on-board computation, or, when highly uncertain, query a more accurate cloud model. Then, I will present a collaborative learning algorithm that allows a diversity of robots to mine their real-time sensory streams for valuable training examples to send to the cloud for model improvement. The utility of these algorithms will be demonstrated on months of field data and experiments on state-of-the-art embedded deep learning hardware. I will conclude this talk by outlining a number of future research directions on the systems and theoretical aspects of networked system control, some of which extend beyond cloud robotics.

Biography: Sandeep Chinchali is a computer science PhD candidate at Stanford, advised by Sachin Katti and Marco Pavone. Previously, he was the first principal data scientist at Uhana, a Stanford startup working on data-driven optimization of cellular networks, now acquired by VMWare. His research on networked control has led to proof-of-concept trials with major cellular network operators and was a finalist for best student paper at Robotics: Science and Systems 2019. Prior to Stanford, he graduated from Caltech, where he worked on robotics at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL). He is a recipient of the Stanford Graduate Fellowship and National Science Foundation (NSF) fellowships.

Host: Host: Professor Konstantinos Psounis

Location: Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience (MCB) - 102

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Mayumi Thrasher