Robot Autonomy: Data Collection and Interaction with Humans

who: Manuela Veloso, CMU

when: 10:30pm Friday, 2/19

***In general, MLFL will be Thursday 12pm this semester. However, this week it is Friday 10:30am with breakfast***

Abstract:

We research on autonomous mobile robots with a seamless integration of perception, cognition, and action. In this talk, I will briefly introduce our CoBot service robots, who consistently move in our buildings to fulfill user requests. I will then introduce the CoBot robots as novel mobile data collectors of vital information of our buildings, and present their data representation, their active data gathering algorithm, and the particular use of the gathered WiFi data by CoBot. I will further present a detailed overview of multiple contributions in terms of human-robot interaction, and detail the use and planning for language-based complex commands. I will then conclude with some philosophical and technical points on my view on the future of autonomous robots in our environments.

Bio:

Manuela Maria Veloso is the Herbert A. Simon Professor in Computer Science and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. She was the President of AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) until 2014, and the co-founder and a Past President of the RoboCup Federation. She is a fellow of AAAI, IEEE, and AAAS. She founded and directs the CORAL research laboratory, for the study of autonomous agents that Collaborate, Observe, Reason, Act, and Learn, http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coral. Professor Veloso and her students have worked with a variety of autonomous robots, including mobile service robots and soccer robots. The CoBot service robots have autonomously navigated for more than 1,000km in multi-floor office buildings. See http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mmv for further information, including publications.