Undergraduate Mathematical Sciences Seminar
Thursday, February 5, 2009, 12:30 -- 1:50pm
Toward High-level Reasoning for Autonomous Systems
Dieter Fox, UW Department of Computer Science
Abstract: Over the last decade, the robotics community has developed highly efficient and robust solutions to state estimation problems such as robot localization, people tracking, and map building. With the availability of various techniques for spatially consistent sensor integration, an important next goal is to enable robots to reason about the many objects located in our everyday environments and to reason about spatial concepts such as rooms, hallways, streets, and intersections. An additional requirement for successful operation in populated environments is the ability to recognize the intent of humans and to adapt to their behavior patterns.
In this talk I will present an overview of some recent work using graphical models and machine learning techniques to extract high level information from raw sensor data. Examples include place and object recognition from vision and laser data, and human activity recognition from wearable sensor data. I will conclude with an outlook for research directions in autonomous systems.