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Spring 2011 GRASP Seminar – Edwin Olson, University of Michigan, “Winning the MAGIC 2010 Autonomous Robotics Competition”

February 25, 2011 @ 11:00 am - 12:00 pm

Abstract: The
MAGIC 2010 competition asked teams of robots to collaboratively perform
reconnaissance missions in a 250,000m^2 urban indoor/outdoor
environment: explore the area, build a map, and recognize interesting
objects— with as little human intervention as possible. In this talk,
I’ll describe how our team of 14 robots won the competition and
$750,000. Central challenges included inaccurate dead-reckoning
information, limited communications, moving and lethal obstacles, and a
scale of operation (environment size and number of robots) that pushed
existing mapping algorithms to failure. Key to our systems’ success was
our ability to maintain a consistent coordinate frame and the ability
to elicit critically useful information from the human operators while
simultaneously minimizing their workload. In addition to showing cases
where our system performed well, I’ll describe some of the failure
modes that motivate our ongoing work.

Presenter

- Learn More

Edwin Olson is an assistant
professor at the University of Michigan with research interests in
robot autonomy, perception, and learning. In 2010, he led Team Michigan
to first place in the MAGIC 2010 robotics competition. He received his
PhD, M.Eng., and B.S. from MIT, where he was also a core member of
MIT’s DARPA Urban Challenge team.

Details

Date:
February 25, 2011
Time:
11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Event Category: