*********************************
There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
*********************************
Title: Structured Learning and Inference for Robot Motion Generation
Committee:
Dr. Byron Boots (Advisor), School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Frank Dellaert, School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Sonia Chernova, School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Evangelos Theodorou, School of Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Nathan Ratliff, Seattle Robotics Lab, NVIDIA Research
Abstract:
The ability to generate motions that accomplish desired tasks is fundamental to any robotic system. Robots must be able to generate such motions in a safe and feasible manner, sufficiently quickly, and in dynamic and uncertain environments. In addressing these problems, there exists a dichotomy between traditional methods and modern learning-based approaches. Often both of these paradigms exhibit complementary strengths and weaknesses, for example, while the former are interpretable and integrate prior knowledge, the latter are data-driven and flexible to design. In this thesis, I present two techniques for robot motion generation that exploit structure to bridge this gap and leverage the best of both worlds to efficiently find solutions in real-time. The first technique is a planning as inference framework that encodes structure through probabilistic graphical models, and the second technique is a reactive policy synthesis framework that encodes structure through task-map trees. Within both frameworks, I present two strategies that use said structure as a canvas to incorporate learning in a manner that is generalizable and interpretable while maintaining constraints like safety even during learning.
