See below for the abstract.

The talk is taking place this Friday (April 3rd) at McGill in the McConnell building, room 13 between 15:30 - 16:30

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Joelle Pineau jpineau@cs.mcgill.ca Date: Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 10:16 PM Subject: SOCS Colloquium This Friday -- Dr. Nicholas Roy (MIT) To: aaron.courville@gmail.com

Dear All,

This Friday, Dr. Nicholas Roy, from MIT, will be giving the weekly SOCS colloquium. You are all invited to attend. Following the talk there will be refreshments in the SOCS lounge.

For an appointment with the speaker, please contact me directly: jpineau@cs.mcgill.ca

Hope to see you there!

Best regards,

Joelle

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2009/04/03, MC13, 15:30 - 16:30

Planning and Learning in Information Space Nicholas Roy, MIT

Abstract:

Decision making with imperfect knowledge is an essential capability for unmanned vehicles operating in populated, dynamic domains. For example, a UAV flying autonomously indoors will not be able to rely on GPS for position estimation, but instead use on-board sensors to track its position and map the obstacles in its environment. The planned trajectories for such a vehicle must therefore incorporate sensor limitations to avoid collisions and to ensure accurate state estimation for stable flight -- that is, the planner must be be able to predict and avoid uncertainty in the state, in the dynamics and in the model of the world. Incorporating uncertainty requires planning in information space, which leads to substantial computational cost but allows our unmanned vehicles to plan deliberate sensing actions that can not only improve the state estimate, but even improve the vehicle's model of the world and how people interact with the vehicle.

I will discuss recent results from my group in planning in information space; our algorithms allow robots to generate plans that are robust to state and model uncertainty, while planning to learn more about the world. I will describe the navigation system for a quadrotor helicopter flying autonomously without GPS using laser range-finding, and will show how these results extend to autonomous mapping and human-robot interaction.

Bio:

Nicholas Roy is the Boeing Assistant Professor in the Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. from McGill University, and his Ph. D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2003. His research interests include autonomous systems, mobile robotics, human-computer interaction, decision-making under uncertainty and machine learning.