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Tedori-Callinan Distinguished Lecture: “Robotic Predictions are Hard, Especially About the Future”
November 4, 2025 at 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM
Many autonomous systems (e.g, driverless cars and drones) must make decisions based on predictions of the future actions of other nearby agents, whose dynamics and intentions are unknown. E.g., autonomous cars must predict the motions of surrounding vehicles, pedestrians and bicycles. Autonomous racing drones must avoid crashing into other drones on the race course. Unfortunately, only partial and noisy data on the motions of these potential hazards are available. This talk will introduce a novel method to approximate, in real-time, a predictive Koopman operator for each potential hazard from noisy data, quantify the uncertainty of the future predictions, and use the quantified predictions to provide probabilistic collision avoidance guarantees within a real-time model predictive control framework. Experiments with ground robots, a drone, and a semi-autonomous crane on an ocean going vessel will illustrate the ideas.
Joel W. Burdick
Richard L. and Dorothy M. Hayman Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Bioengineering, California Institute of Technology
Joel Burdick is the Richard and Dorothy Hayman Professor of Mechanical Engineering. He received his undergraduate degrees in mechanical engineering and chemistry from Duke University and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering from Stanford University. He has been with the department of Mechanical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology since May 1988, where he has been the recipient of the NSF Presidential Young Investigator award, the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator award, and the Feynman fellowship. Prof. Burdick has also received the ASCIT award for excellence in undergraduate teaching and the GSA award for excellence in graduate student education. He was a coauthor on the best paper award for the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in 2020, and a finalist for this award in 1993, 1999, 2000, and 2005, 2016. He received the Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award in 2011. In addition to his position in Mechanical Engineering, Prof. Burdick has also appointments the Dept. of Control and Dynamical Systems and Medical Engineering.