2024-2025 Seminar Series
Upcoming Seminar
Speaker: Ian Abraham (Yale University)
Title: Optimality and Robustness in Robotic Exploration
Abstract: Effective exploration is a vital component in the success of robotic applications in ocean and space exploration, environmental monitoring, and search and rescue tasks. This talk presents a novel formulation of exploration that permits optimality criteria and performance guarantees for robotic exploration tasks. We define the problem of exploration as a coverage problem on continuous (infinite-dimensional) spaces based on ergodic theory and derive control methods that satisfy various notions of optimality and robustness such as asymptotic coverage, set-invariance, time-optimality, and reachability in exploration tasks. Last, we demonstrate successful execution of the approach on a range of robotic systems and present an outlook on novel directions for robot learning.
Date: Thursday, February 6th 2025
Time: 09:00-10:00 AM EST
Link: https://columbiauniversity.zoom.us/j/91247893326?pwd=L2JWU21aQzc4cU1ZQklEb0QrWGQvdz09
Line-Up and Video Links
| Date | Speaker | Title | YouTube |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dec. 5, 2024 | Andrea Del Prete | Globally Optimal and Safe Robot Control | (link) |
| Feb. 6, 2025 | Ian Abraham | Optimality and Robustness in Robotic Exploration | |
| Feb. 21, 2025 | Cosimo Della Santina | TBD | |
| Mar. 13, 2025 | Jemin Hwangbo | TBD | |
| Apr. 3, 2025 | Sylvia Herbert | TBD |