LCSR Seminar: Spatial AI for Robots and Humans

Description

John Leonard, a professor of mechanical and ocean engineering and associate department head for education in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering, will give a talk titled "Spatial AI for Robots and Humans" for the Laboratory for Computational Sensing + Robotics.

Abstract:

The goal of Human-Centered Embodied Intelligence is to develop robots that can work safely alongside humans, helping them to perform difficult or dangerous tasks. We will discuss a variety of research projects spanning automated driving, object-based mapping and localization, and autonomous underwater vehicle navigation. Two key themes are increasing the expressive capacity of the environmental models used in localization and mapping systems (representation) and improving the performance of the algorithms used to estimate these models from data (inference). Our ultimate goal is to provide autonomous robots with a more comprehensive understanding of the world, facilitating lifelong learning in complex dynamic environments.

Bio:

In addition to his roles at MIT, John J. Leonard is also a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His research addresses the problems of navigation and mapping for autonomous underwater vehicles, self-driving vehicles, and other types of mobile robots. He holds the degrees of BSEE in electrical engineering and science from the University of Pennsylvania (1987) and DPhil in engineering science from the University of Oxford (1994). He is an IEEE Fellow (2014) and an AAAS Fellow (2020). Leonard is a technical adviser at Toyota Research Institute.