Abstract: Autonomous mobile robots are being deployed in more diverse environments than ever before. That include shared spaces, where robots and humans have to coexist and cooperate. To assure that our joint life will be safe and successful, it is necessary to enable robots to learn and utilise the information about human motion patterns for imporved performance.

In this talk, I will provide a birds-eye view on methods enabling dynamic awareness for navigation of mobile robots, with an especial focus on maps of dynamics. Maps of dynamics is a large family of methods built upon the assumption that dynamics can be treated as a feature of the environment. Consequently, they allow the robot to anticipate environmental changes and motion of uncontrolled agents outside of the robot's sensor range. Thus allowing the robot to account for dynamics in the early stages of the planning process.

The goal of the talk is to introduce the listeners to the field and present existing and potential applications of maps of dynamics. Furthermore, the talk will also provide insight into open research questions and under-explored research direction.

Speakers:  Tomasz Kucner is an Assistant Professor with Aalto University in robotics and autonomous systems and is heading the Mobile Robotics group. His research objective is to enable autonomous intelligent systems to efficiently and safely operate in the noisy and dynamic reality of shared human-robot environments. His conviction is that to achieve this goal it is essential to enable robots to acquire high-level knowledge through implicit ques of daily human behaviour and through enabling robots to continuously self assess and evaluate the quality of their internal models.

Affiliation: Aalto University

Place of Seminar:  Zoom