Event
Lockheed Martin Robotics Seminar: Nicholas Roy, "Planning for Aggressive Autonomous Flight"
Friday, March 13, 2015
11:30 a.m.
2121 JM Patterson
Ania Picard
appicard@umd.edu
Lockheed Martin Robotics Seminar
Inference and Planning for Aggressive Autonomous Flight
Nicholas Roy
Associate Professor
Aeronautics and Astronautics
Massachusetts institute of Technology
Host: Derek Paley
Abstract
Getting a small unmanned aircraft to fly aggressively and autonomously through an unknown, cluttered environment creates substantial challenges for the vehicle's navigation and control. Without a prior map, the vehicle has to detect obstacles and avoid them, often on the basis of little sensor data, and make rapid decisions about how to move around given an uncertain and incomplete model of the world and the vehicle¹s position. I will discuss some recent results from my group in developing approximate inference and planning algorithms that have enabled fast and aggressive autonomous motion for unmanned vehicles.
Biography
Nicholas Roy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. He received his Ph. D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2003. His research interests include autonomous systems, mobile robotics, human-computer interaction, decision-making under uncertainty and machine learning. He has returned to MIT after two years at Google [x] as the founder of Project Wing.