Dieter Fox

University of Washington

Abstract

Over the last decade, the robotics community has developed highly efficient and robust solutions to state estimation problems such as robot localization, people tracking, and map building.  With the availability of various techniques for spatially consistent sensor integration, an important next goal is to enable robots to reason about the many objects located in our everyday environments and to reason about spatial concepts such as different rooms and hallways.  An additional requirement for successful operation in populated environments is the ability to interact with people in a natural way.

 

In this talk I will present an overview of our recent work aimed at making progress toward these goals.  Most of this work builds on depth cameras, a new breed of vision systems that provide per pixel color and depth information.  Depth cameras readily provide data that is extremely helpful for various robotics tasks, and I will illustrate their application in areas such as dense 3D mapping, object modeling and recognition, and manipulation.

Bio

Dieter Fox is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, where he heads the UW Robotics and State Estimation Lab. Since Fall 2009, he is also Director of the Intel Labs Seattle, a research lab with close ties to the University of Washington. Dieter obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Bonn, Germany.  Before going to UW, he spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher at the CMU Robot Learning Lab.  Dieter's research is in artificial intelligence, with a focus on state estimation applied to robotics and activity recognition. Dieter has published over 100 technical papers and is co-author of the text book "Probabilistic Robotics". He received an NSF CAREER Award and several best paper awards at major robotics and AI conferences. He is an editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and was program co-chair of the 2008 AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence..

4:15pm

B17 Upson Hall

Thursday, September 30, 2010

Refreshments at 3:45pm in the Upson 4th Floor Atrium

 

Computer Science

Colloquium

Fall 2010

www.cs.cornell.edu/events/colloquium

Toward High-level Reasoning in Robotics