🚀 go-pugleaf

       Department of Computer Science/The University of Chicago

               S E M I N A R   A N N O U N C E M E N T


DATE:  Wednesday, May 4

TIME:  2:30

PLACE: Ryerson 276

GUEST SPEAKER:  REID SIMMONS from Carnegie Mellon University

TALK TITLE:    SELF-RELIANT MOBILE ROBOTS

ABSTRACT:

Autonomous mobile robots have been demonstrated that successfully
navigate,
manipulate, and amble in unstructured environments -- as long as the 
demonstration doesn't last too long.  To operate continually over long
periods of time, robots must do more than just repeating the same tasks
over and over:  in long-term operation, the main problem is that
infrequently
occurring events do occur.  To be successful, robot systems must be able
to detect such events and react to them in a timely and intelligent
manner.

This talk will present some of our research, much in the early stages of
development, that addresses this problem of long-term, self-reliant 
behavior.  The main result to date has been the development of the Task
Control Architecture (TCA) for coordinating and controlling the planning,
execution, monitoring, and scheduling of mobile robot tasks.  We will
describe
how TCA has been used to achieve a high degree of reliability for an 
autonomous planetary rover and an indoor mobile manipulator.  Other
research
focuses on the use of probabilistic and decision-theoretic approaches for
allocating the robot's scarce computational and physical resources,
including
planners and sensors, the use of causal reasoning to analyze and recover
from unexpected errors, and the use of machine learning to detect relevant
features in the environment.  The talk will attempt to tie these all 
together into a framework for self-reliant behavior.

       *** Coffee in Ryerson 255 after the talk ***

Visitor's Host:  Jim Firby