[Colloq] Colloq. Talk: "Planning under uncertainty in robotics"

[Nicole Bekerian]

The College of Computer and Information Science Presents:

Title: Planning under uncertainty in robotics
Speaker: Dr. Robert Platt
         Research Scientist
         Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Date: Wednesday November 16th at 3:00pm
Location: 366 West Village H

Abstract:

One of the key challenges in robotics is designing robots that can function robustly even when the state of the world is uncertain. This is a fundamental problem in many application areas including manufacturing, space exploration, and domestic assistance. In this talk, I frame this as a planning under uncertainty problem. Planning under uncertainty is a general framework in which the objective is to move from an initial "belief state" where the system is very uncertain about the state of the world to one where the system is certain that it has achieved the task objectives. One of the hallmarks of planning under uncertainty is the ability to generate information-gathering strategies automatically as needed to solve a problem. Because finding optimal solutions to this problem is PSPACE-hard in general, I will propose a class of approximate algorithms based on solving "determinized" sub-problems that is well-suited to continuous space and long time horizon robotics domains. Although these algorithms are sub-optimal, they are correct in the sense that they can be guaranteed to achieve task objectives eventually. In addition, it turns out that it is possible to leverage convex sub-structure to solve these determinized planning problems efficiently. I will demonstrate the approach in the context of a difficult robot manipulation problem where the robot must simultaneously localize and grasp an occluded object whose position is initially unknown.


Bio:

Robert Platt will start as an Assistant Professor at SUNY Buffalo in the Spring of 2012. Currently, he is a research scientist in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to coming to MIT, he was the team lead for control and autonomy for Robonaut 2, a NASA robot that flew to the international space station aboard the space shuttle Discovery in February 2011. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Host: Marsette Vona




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Best, 
Nicole 

______________________________________________________________ 

Nicole Bekerian 
Administrative Assistant 

Northeastern University 
College of Computer and Information Science 
360 Huntington Ave. 
202 West Village H 
Boston, MA  02115 

Phone: 617.373.2462 
Fax: 617.373.5121