Autonomy Incubator Seminar Series:
PLANNING AND LEARNING IN INFORMATION SPACE FOR AUTONOMOUS AIR VEHICLES
Dr. Nicholas Roy, Associate Professor in Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
September 22, 2014, 2:00 pm, NASA Langley, Pearl Young Theater
Hosts: Danette Allen (NASA Langley) and Fred Brooks (NIA)
Abstract:
Decision making with imperfect knowledge is an essential capability for unmanned vehicles operating in populated, dynamic domains. For example, a UAV flying autonomously indoors will not be able to rely on GPS for position estimation, but instead use on-board sensors to track its position and map the obstacles in its environment. The planned trajectories for such a vehicle must therefore incorporate sensor limitations to avoid collisions and to ensure accurate state estimation for stable flight — that is, the planner must be be able to predict and avoid uncertainty in the state, in the dynamics and in the model of the world. Incorporating uncertainty requires planning in information space, which leads to substantial computational cost but allows our unmanned vehicles to plan deliberate sensing actions that can not only improve the state estimate, but even improve the vehicle’s model of the world.
I will discuss recent results from my group in planning in information space. I will describe the navigation system for a variety of air vehicles flying autonomously without GPS using laser range-finding, and will show how these results extend to autonomous mapping and general tasks with imperfect information.
Bio:
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.