[Colloq] Colloquium - Sachin Patil - Coping with Uncertainty in Robotic Navigation, Exploration, and Grasping - 11/17, 2pm, 366 WVH

[Biron, Jessica]

Title: Coping with Uncertainty in Robotic Navigation, Exploration, and 
Grasping

A key challenge in robotics is to robustly complete navigation, 
exploration, and manipulation tasks when the state of the world is 
uncertain. This is a fundamental problem in several application areas 
such as logistics, personal robotics, and healthcare where robots with 
imprecise actuation and sensing are being deployed in unstructured 
environments. In such a setting, it is necessary to reason about the 
acquisition of perceptual knowledge and to perform information gathering 
actions as necessary. In this talk, I will present an approach to motion 
planning under motion and sensing uncertainty called "belief space" 
planning where the objective is to trade off exploration (gathering 
information) and exploitation (performing actions) in the context of 
performing a task. In particular, I will present how we can use 
trajectory optimization to compute locally-optimal solutions to a 
determinized version of this problem in Gaussian belief spaces. I will 
show that it is possible to obtain significant computational speedups 
without explicitly optimizing over the covariances by considering a 
partial collocation approach. I will also address the problem of 
computing such trajectories, given that measurements may not be obtained 
during execution due to factors such as limited field of view of sensors 
and occlusions. I will demonstrate this approach in the context of 
robotic grasping in unknown environments where the robot has to 
simultaneously explore the environment and grasp occluded objects whose 
geometry and positions are initially unknown.

Bio: Sachin Patil is a postdoctoral researcher working with Prof. Pieter 
Abbeel and Prof. Ken Goldberg at the University of California at 
Berkeley. He previously completed his PhD with Prof. Ron Alterovitz at 
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on 
developing rigorous motion planning algorithms to enable new, minimally 
invasive medical procedures and to facilitate reliable operation of 
robots in unstructured environments.