Spring 2024 GRASP on Robotics: Dinesh Manocha, University of Maryland, College Park, “Robot Navigation in Complex Indoor and Outdoor Environments”

This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Wu and Chen and virtual attendance on Zoom.

ABSTRACT

In the last few decades, most robotics success stories have been limited to structured or controlled environments. A major challenge is to develop robot systems that can operate in complex or unstructured environments corresponding to homes, dense traffic, outdoor terrains, public places, etc. In this talk, we give an overview of our ongoing work on developing robust planning and navigation technologies that use recent advances in computer vision, sensor technologies, machine learning, and motion planning algorithms. We present new methods that utilize multi-modal observations from an RGB camera, 3D LiDAR, and robot odometry for scene perception, along with deep reinforcement learning for reliable planning. The latter is also used to compute dynamically feasible and spatial aware velocities for a robot navigating among mobile obstacles and uneven terrains. We have integrated these methods with wheeled robot and legged platforms and highlight their performance in crowded indoor scenes and dense outdoor terrains.