Princeton Robotics Seminar - High-confidence Robot Motion Planning under Uncertainty

This talk will provide an overview of research activities at the ASCO lab, currently including robot-assisted surgical micro-manipulation and navigation of autonomous vehicles (aerial, underwater, or ground) under state and perception uncertainty. We will specifically focus on motion planning with built-in robustness guarantees, i.e. by aiming to certify expected performance before actual deployment. The core idea is to employ probably-approximately-correct (PAC) bounds on performance which are used as an objective function in control policy optimization. Such robust policies could then provide high-confidence performance guarantees, such as “with 99% chance the robot will reach its goal, while avoiding collisions with 99.9% chance”, and result in improved safety and reliability.

Bio: Marin Kobilarov is an Associate Professor at the Johns Hopkins University and a Principal Engineer at Zoox/Amazon. At JHU he leads the Autonomous Systems, Control and Optimization (ASCO) lab which develops algorithms and software for planning, learning, and control of autonomous robotic systems. Their focus is on computational theory at the intersection of planning and learning, and on the system integration and deployment of robots that can operate safely and efficiently in challenging environments.

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PhD students & faculty: If you are interested in meeting with Marin on 3/8, please reach out to nsimon@princeton.edu.

PhD students: If you are interested in joining the speaker for lunch on 3/8 from 12:15 - 1:30 PM, please fill out this form.