Speaker: Manuela M. Veloso
Time: 7:00pm, 15 OCT. 2011
Abstract :
We envision ubiquitous autonomous mobile robots that can help and coexist with humans. Such robots are still far from common, as our environments offer great challenges to robust robot perception, cognition, and action. We realize the envisioned robot and human coexistance as offering a symbiotic human-robot interaction, such that we view robots and humans with complementary limitations and expertise. I will present CoBot, our visitor's companion robot that can provide guidance to visitors unfamiliar with the building, while it can also identify and overcome its limitations by asking for human help. I will present CoBot's effective mobile robot indoor localization and navigation algorithms that use a WiFi signature perceptual map combined with geometric constraints of the building. I will illustrate CoBot's performance with examples of autonomous hours-long runs of the robot in our buildings. I will then discuss the opportunities and tradeoffs raised by the symbiotic human-robot interaction, and present illustrative studies. I conclude with the presentation of our second CoBot robot and its novel mobile telepresence, and our ongoing work towards having multiple robots and humans engaged in planning and coordination for a variety of tasks.
Short Bio:
Manuela M. Veloso is Herbert A. Simon Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. She has courtesy Professor appointments in the Robotics Institute, in the Machine Learning Department, in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, and in the Mechanical Engineering Department. Professor Veloso founded and directs the CORAL research laboratory, for the study of agents that Collaborate, Observe, Reason, Act, and Learn (www.cs.cmu.edu/~coral). Professor Veloso is Fellow of IEEE, Fellow of AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science), and Fellow of AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence). She is the President-Elect of AAAI and she was the President of the RoboCup Federation for the last three years, and of which she continues to be a member of the Board of Trustees. Professor Veloso was recently recognized with the 2009 ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award for her contributions to agents in uncertain and dynamic environments, including distributed robot localization and world modeling, strategy selection in multiagent systems in the presence of adversaries, and robot learning from demonstration. Professor Veloso is the author of one book on "Planning by Analogical Reasoning" and editor of several other books. She is also an author in over 280 journal articles and conference papers.
