[Intelligence Seminar] TOMORROW: Manuela Veloso, GHC 4303, 3:30, "Towards Autonomous Mobile Robots Coexisting with Humans in Indoor Environments"

Noah A Smith nasmith at cs.cmu.edu
Mon Mar 1 09:35:33 EST 2010


Intelligence Seminar

March 2, 2010
3:30 pm
GHC 4303

Title:  Towards Autonomous Mobile Robots Coexisting with Humans in
Indoor Environments
Manuela M. Veloso, Carnegie Mellon University

We envision ubiquitous autonomous mobile robots that can help and
coexist with humans. Such robots are still far from common, as our
environments offer great challenges to robust robot perception,
cognition, and action. We realize the envisioned robot and human
coexistance as offering a symbiotic human-robot interaction, such that
we view robots and humans with complementary limitations and
expertise. I will present CoBot, our visitor's companion robot that
can provide guidance to visitors unfamiliar with the building, while it can
also identify and overcome its limitations by asking for human help. I will
present CoBot's effective mobile robot indoor localization and navigation
algorithms that use a WiFi signature perceptual map combined with
geometric constraints of the building. I will illustrate CoBot's
performance with examples of a few autonomous hours-long past runs of
the robot in Wean Hall and very recent runs in the new Gates Hillman
Center. I will then discuss the opportunities and tradeoffs raised by
the symbiotic human-robot interaction, and present illustrative
studies. I conclude with the introduction of our newly arrived second
CoBot robot and the presentation of our ongoing work towards having
multiple robots and humans engaged in planning and coordination for a
variety
of tasks.

This work is joint with my students Joydeep Biswas, Stephanie
Rosenthal, and Nick Armstrong-Crews. The robots were remarkably
designed and constructed by Michael Licitra, as omnidirectional
four-wheeled robots, inspired by his previously created platform of
our small-size soccer robots.

Bio:

Manuela M. Veloso is Herbert A. Simon Professor of Computer Science at
Carnegie Mellon University.  She directs the CORAL research
laboratory, for the study of agents that Collaborate, Observe, Reason,
Act, and Learn, www.cs.cmu.edu/~coral. Professor Veloso is a Fellow of
the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and
the President of the RoboCup Federation.  She recently received the
2009 ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award for her contributions
to agents in uncertain and dynamic environments, including distributed
robot localization and world modeling, strategy selection in
multiagent systems in the presence of adversaries, and robot learning
from demonstration. Professor Veloso is the author of one book on
"Planning by Analogical Reasoning" and editor of several other
books. She is also an author in over 200 journal articles and
conference papers.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/pipermail/intelligence-seminar-announce/attachments/20100301/5b74e10e/attachment-0001.html


More information about the intelligence-seminar-announce mailing list