Building robots the Carnegie Mellon way
They are robots (CoBot) that do things for people and robustly interact with them. USA’s Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) actively uses the system, building robots which follow symbiotic autonomy – meaning they are aware of their limitations and proactively ask for help from humans.
Students of the International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad (IIIT Hyderabad) got to learn more about these smart machines through someone who has actually worked with them. Dr Manuela Veloso, professor of computer science and robotics and the head of the Machine Learning Department, Carnegie Mellon University, talked about Symbiotic Robot Autonomy and Learning in a KCIS (Kohli Centre on Intelligent Systems) Distinguished Lecture recently.
She discussed CoBot’s novel localisation technology and symbiotic autonomy which enables them to move in buildings, for more than 1,000 km. Novel mobile data collection techniques are used to enable CoBots collect vital information for buildings. The talk gave an overview of challenges faced in processing and classifying the environment and techniques to overcome the simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) problem. Used for selfdriven cars or robots, SLAM involves updating or constructing a map of an unknown environment while keeping track of the agent (car or robot’s) location within it.
Prof Veloso also shared instances of multiple robot-human interactions to show how robust the system was. The talk covered topics ranging from internal map representation (how robots read maps within buildings), symbiotic autonomy (their dependence on humans), transparency, verbalisation, and localisation (how the machines communicate with others and map their location). The cycle of creation was explained in terms of actuation, cognition, and perception. She shared instances of how the robots learn from human interactions and also showed clips from the latest robot soccer championship. A possible collaboration between CMU and IIIT in the field of AI and Robotics was also discussed.