RIM Seminar - Feb. 15 - Kuffner on Motion Planning

A RIM Seminar will be held on Tuesday, February 15th, 2011 at Noon. The seminar will take place in the Marcus Nano Building at the corner of Ferst Dr and Atlantic Dr. Lunch will be provided. The talk will focus on motion planning for humanoid robotic platforms.

Autonomous Motion Planning for Humanoid Robots

James Kuffner

Carnegie Mellon University

Abstract:

One of the grand challenges in artificial intelligence is to create truly "general-purpose" autonomous robots for home, hospital, and office environments. This talk will discuss some of the challenges of motion autonomy and present an overview of some practical automatic motion planning methods for biped navigation, and object grasping and manipulation. Experimental results on several humanoid robot platforms around the world will be shown, along with some new efforts in mobile manipulation. Finally, the long-term prospects for the future development of robot autonomy as it relates to search-based AI and the rise of high-performance cloud computing will be discussed.

Bio:

James Kuffner is an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University currently working as a Research Software Engineer at Google, Inc. He received a Ph.D. from the Stanford University Dept. of Computer Science Robotics Laboratory in 1999. He spent two years as a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Tokyo working on software and planning algorithms for humanoid robots. He joined the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute in 2002. He has published over 100 technical papers and received the Okawa Foundation Award for Young Researchers in 2007.