Re-thinking the Perception-Action Paradigm for Super Autonomous Robots

Dr. Giuseppe Loianno

Assistant Professor, New York University

Autonomous mobile robots will play a critical role in addressing diverse time-sensitive and hazardous tasks across various application scenarios. These include logistics, reconnaissance, search and rescue missions, monitoring, transportation, space missions, and construction. Future smart cities will need to reconsider their current transportation and delivery systems. Small-scale aerial and ground robots will navigate in dense urban environments to deliver in a timely manner various items. To handle these challenges effectively, robots must demonstrate the ability to execute agile maneuvers and collaborate efficiently within unknown, uncertain, and confined spaces. In this talk, I will discuss several recent research results on developing Super Autonomous or USARC: Unmanned, Small, Agile, Resilient, and Collaborative robots. Achieving this goal requires reimagining the existing perception-action paradigm governing robot autonomy. This involves shifting the existing paradigm from a sequential to a concurrent approach by combining in a principled manner physics-based and data-driven techniques across modeling, perception, learning, and control. This will result in an architecture which proactively and continuously improves its navigation performances and that naturally scales to multi-robot settings by leveraging data from multiple agents. Consequently, this will boost agility, resilience, and improve both individual and collaborative decentralized decision-making processes for small-scale robots.

Giuseppe Loianno is currently an Assistant Professor at the New York University, New York, NY, USA, and the Director of the Agile Robotics and Perception Lab (https://wp.nyu.edu/arpl/) working on autonomous robots. Prior to joining NYU, he was a Research Scientist and Team Leader with GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA. He has authored or coauthored more than 70 conference papers, journal papers, and book chapters. His research interests include perception, learning, and control for autonomous robots. Dr. Loianno is recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the DARPA Young Faculty Award, the IROS Toshio Fukuda Young Professional Award in 2022, Conference Editorial Board Best Associate Editor Award at ICRA 2022, and Best Reviewer Award at ICRA 2016. He is senior editor for IROS 2023-2025 and IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters as well as an associate editor for multiple other robotics journals including IEEE Transactions on Robotics, International Journal of Robotics Research, Field Robotics, and Frontiers in Robotics and AI. He is chair of the IEEE RAS Robotics Foundations cluster and the IEEE RAS TC on Aerial Robotics and Unmanned Aerial Systems. He was the General Chair of the IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security and Rescue Robotics (SSRR) in 2021 as well as Program Chair in 2019, 2020, and 2022. His work has been featured in a large number of renowned international news and magazines such as IEEE Spectrum, Popular Science, Scientific American, TechCrunch, MIT Technological Review, and Quartz.

https://columbiauniversity.zoom.us/j/94927042939?pwd=c1lXcGM4ejJiaVJQWGcrWUNJRGlFZz09

Meeting ID: 949 2704 2939

Passcode: 912102