Computer Science Seminar: Dinesh Manocha

Description

Dinesh Manocha, a professor of computer science and electrical and computer engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park, will give a talk titled "Robot Navigation in Complex Indoor and Outdoor Environments" for the Department of Computer Science.

Abstract:

In the last few decades, most robotics success stories have been limited to structured or controlled environments. A major challenge is to develop robot systems that can operate in complex or unstructured environments corresponding to homes, dense traffic, outdoor terrains, public places, etc. In this talk, Dinesh Manocha gives an overview of his ongoing work on developing robust planning and navigation technologies that use recent advances in computer vision, sensor technologies, machine learning, and motion planning algorithms. He presents new methods that utilize multimodal observations from an RGB camera, 3D LiDAR, and robot odometry for scene perception, along with deep reinforcement learning for reliable planning; the latter is also used to compute dynamically feasible and spatially aware velocities for a robot navigating among mobile obstacles and uneven terrains. These methods have been integrated with wheeled robots, home robots, and legged platforms and their performance has been highlighted in crowded indoor scenes, home environments, and dense outdoor terrains.