Events

Symbiotic Autonomy: Robots, Humans, and the Web

Manuela Veloso, Carnegie Mellon University

Abstract:
We envision ubiquitous autonomous mobile robots that coexist and interact with humans while performing assistance tasks. Such robots are still far from common, as our environments offer great challenges to robust autonomous robot perception, cognition, and action. In this talk, I present symbiotic robot autonomy in which robots are aware of their limitations and proactively ask for help from humans, access the web for missing knowledge, and coordinate with other robots. Such symbiotic autonomy has enabled our CoBot robots to move in our multi-floor buildings performing a variety of service tasks, including escorting visitors, and transporting packages between locations. I will describe CoBot's fully autonomous effective mobile robot indoor localization and navigation algorithms, its human-centered task planning, and its symbiotic interaction with the humans and with the web. I will further discuss our ongoing research on knowledge learning from our speech-based robot interaction with humans. The talk will be illustrated with results and examples from many hours-long runs of the robots in our buildings.

Biography:
Manuela M. Veloso is Herbert A. Simon Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research focuses on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. She founded and directs the CORAL research laboratory, for the study of multiagent systems where agents Collaborate, Observe, Reason, Act, and Learn, (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coral). Professor Veloso is an IEEE Fellow, AAAS Fellow, and AAAI Fellow, and is the current President of AAAI. Professor Veloso was recently recognized by the Chinese Academy of Sciences as Einstein Chair Professor. She also received the 2009 ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award for her contributions to agents in uncertain and dynamic environments, including distributed robot localization and world modeling, strategy selection in multiagent systems in the presence of adversaries, and robot learning from demonstration. Professor Veloso is the author of the book Planning and Learning by Analogical Reasoning and editor of several other books. She is also an author of over 280 journal articles and conference papers.