IIIT Hyderabad Hosted A KCIS Distinguished Lecture On Symbiotic Robot Autonomy

-Dr.Manuela Veloso, Professor of Computer Science and Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, USA, delivered the speech at the institute –

International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad (IIIT Hyderabad) hosted a KCIS Distinguished Lecture on August 22nd by Dr. Manuela Veloso, Professor of Computer Science and Robotics and the Head of the Machine Learning Department, Carnegie Mellon University, USA. Prof. Veloso delivered a talk on ‘Symbiotic Robot Autonomy and Learning’. Prof. P.J. Narayanan, Director, Prof. Vasudeva Varma, Dean (R&D), Prof. Jayanthi Sivaswamy (Dean Academics), Ms. Kolla Krishna Madhavi, Head of New Initiatives, other IIIT Hyderabad faculty and students were present. There was also a wide participation from the industry representatives, startup community, academia and students from other tech. colleges as well.

Prof. Veloso is on the Advisory Board of the Kohli Center on Intelligent Systems (KCIS), IIIT Hyderabad.

For further information: http://kcis.iiit.ac.in/committee

In the talk, Prof. Veloso introduced the CoBot service that is used in CMU. She discussed CoBot’s novel localization technology and symbiotic autonomy which enables them to move in buildings, for more than 1000 Kms. She talked about their novel mobile data collection techniques and how CoBots collect vital information for buildings and the algorithm that goes behind doing so. The talk gave an overview of challenges faced in processing and classifying the environment and techniques to overcome the SLAM problem. Prof. Veloso shared instances of multiple robot-human interactions to show how robust the system is. The talk covered topics ranging from internal map representation, symbiotic autonomy, transparency, verbalization, and localization. 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.