Maani Ghaffari - Computational Symmetry and Learning for Robotics

Forthcoming mobile robots require efficient generalizable algorithms to operate in challenging and unknown environments without human intervention while collaborating with humans. Today, despite the rapid progress in robotics and autonomy, no robot can deliver human-level performance in everyday tasks and missions such as search and rescue, exploration, and environmental monitoring and conservation. In this talk, I will put forward a vision for enabling efficiency and generalization requirements of real-world robotics via computational symmetry and learning. I will walk you through structures that arise from combining symmetry, geometry, and learning in various foundational problems in robotics and showcase their performance in experiments ranging from perception to control. In the end, I will share my thoughts on promising future directions and opportunities based on lessons learned on the field and campus.