Title:

The Right Stuff: Representing Safety to Get Robots in the Real World

Speaker:

Dr. Shreyas Kousik

Affiliation:

Stanford University

When:

Monday, February 28, 2022 at 2:00:00 PM   Add to Calendar

Where:

MRDC Building, Room 4211

Host:

Dr. Ye Zhao
ye.zhao@me.gatech.edu

Abstract

Autonomous robots have the incredible potential to aid people by taking on difficult tasks and working alongside us. However, it will be difficult to trust robots in widespread deployment without knowing when they are safe. Safety can often be expressed theoretically yet suffer an imperfect translation into numerical representation. My research focuses on this gap: what are the right representations of robot safety to bridge theory and real-world deployment? For this talk, I focus on safety in collision avoidance for robot motion planning. In particular, I present Reachability-based Trajectory Design, a framework that unites theory and representation for real-time, safe robot motion planning. RTD’s foundation in theory makes it applicable to a wide variety of systems, including self-driving cars, quadrotor drones, and manipulator arms. In practice, over thousands of simulations and dozens of hardware trials, RTD has resulted in no collisions while outperforming other methods, establishing a new state of the art. My future work extends from this paradigm to enable robots to learn and adapt their own notions of safety in three ways: online adaptive dynamic model identification for safe motion planning, robust perception that is targeted towards safe control, and co-design of a robot’s perception, planning, and control algorithms to reduce overly cautious robot behavior without losing safety guarantees. In each of these future directions I seek to create and deploy the right representations to transfer theory onto hardware, to make robots do more amazing things safely.

Biography

Shreyas Kousik is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University. He completed his B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2014 and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor in 2020. Shreyas’ research focuses on robot safety, seeking geometric and numerical representations that enable robots to make safe decisions quickly. His Ph.D. work focused on using reachability analysis as a tool to generate such representations for robot motion planning. Currently, he is focusing on reachability applications in robot state estimation, navigation, and perception. His work has been recognized by the ASME DSCC Best Student Paper award in 2019, the Rackham Merit Fellowship, the Robert J. Beyster Computational Innovation Fellowship, and an honorable mention for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

Notes

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