Parallel@Illinois Special Seminar Series

Some Computationally Challenging Problems in Robotics

Wednesday, April 29^th at 4:15 pm CT, B02 CSL

Seth Hutchinson, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

ABSTRACT:Modern robots comprise sophisticated mechanical systems driven by planning and control algorithms that respond dynamically to their environment based on sensory input. In this talk, Prof. Hutchinson will describe a number of difficult computational challenges that confront robots operating in real-world scenarios.

Geometric motion planning is the problem of constructing a collision-free path for a robot in a known environment containing obstacles. The best known, complete algorithms for this problem have running times that are exponential in the dimension of the robot's configuration space, which precludes their use in practice. The problems of localization, mapping, and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) confront robots that must operate in uncertain environments, or whose sensing or actuation is imprecise. Here, the source of computational difficulty is the representation and manipulation of uncertainty. Finally, the problem of planning under uncertainty combines the difficulties of the previous problems. Since the exact effects of the robot's actions are unknown, representation of possible future states as a function of possible actions becomes intractable after only a few stages. Since there is uncertainty in sensing, the present state is known only up to a probability distribution on the state space.

Sampling-based methods have emerged in recent years as a unified approach to all of the above problems. In this talk, in addition to describing the problems, Prof. Hutchinson will briefly describe sampling-based approaches for their solution.

BIO: Seth Hutchinson received his Ph.D. from Purdue University in 1988. In 1990 he joined the faculty at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, where he is currently a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Coordinated Science Laboratory, and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. Hutchinson is Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, and previously served as the first Editor-in-Chief for the RAS Conference Editorial Board. He currently serves on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Robotics Research and the Journal of Intelligent Service Robotics. In 1996 he was a guest editor for a special section of the Transactions devoted to the topic of visual servo control, and in 1994 he was co-chair of an IEEE Workshop on Visual Servoing. In 1996 and 1998 he co-authored papers that were finalists for the King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Transactions Paper Award. He was co-chair of IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Technical Committee on Computer and Robot Vision from 1992 to 1996, and has served on the program committees for more than fifty conferences related to robotics and computer vision. He has published more than 150 papers on the topics of robotics and computer vision, and is coauthor of the books "Principles of Robot Motion: Theory, Algorithms, and Implementations," published by MIT Press, and "Robot Modeling and Control," published by Wiley. Hutchinson, and is a Fellow of the IEEE.