Challenges for Autonomous Mobile Robots

This talk will have two parts. In part one, we will review recent progress in mobile robotics, focusing on the problems of simultaneous mapping and localization (SLAM) and cooperative navigation of mobile sensor networks. The problem of SLAM is stated as follows: starting from an initial position, a mobile robot travels through a sequence of positions and obtains a set of sensor measurements at each position. The goal is for the mobile robot to process the sensor data to compute an estimate of its position while concurrently building a map of the environment. We will present SLAM results for several scenarios including land robot mapping of large-scale environments and undersea mapping using optical imaging sensors. We will also describe work on cooperative navigation for networks of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and autonomous sea-surface vehicles (ASVs).

In the second part of the talk, we will provide an overview of MIT's entry in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. The goal of this effort is to produce a car that can drive autonomously in traffic. Our team has developed a novel strategy for using a large number of inexpensive sensors mounted on the vehicle periphery. Lidar, camera, and radar data streams are processed using an innovative, locally smooth state representation that provides robust perception for real-time autonomous control. A resilient planning and control architecture has been developed for driving in traffic, comprised of an innovative combination of well- proven algorithms for mission planning, situational planning, situational interpretation, and trajectory control. These innovations are being incorporated in two new robotic vehicles equipped for autonomous driving in urban environments, with extensive testing on a DARPA site visit course.

Joint work with Seth Teller, Michael Bosse, Paul Newman, Ryan Eustice, Matthew Walter, Hanumant Singh, Henrik Schmidt, Mike Benjamin, Alexander Bahr, Joseph Curcio, and Andrew Patrikalakis, Jon How, Emilio Frazzoli, David Barrett, David Moore, Edwin Olson, Daniela Rus, Yoshi Kuwata, Luke Fletcher, Justin Teo, Gaston Fiore, Stefan Campbell, Troy Jones, Chris Sanders, and Keoni Maheloni.

John J. Leonard is Associate Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering at MIT and a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His research addresses the problems of navigation and mapping for autonomous mobile robots. He holds the degrees of B.S.E.E. in Electrical Engineering and Science from the University of Pennsylvania (1987) and D.Phil. in Engineering Science from the University of Oxford (formally 1994). He studied at Oxford under a Thouron Fellowship and Research Assistantship funded by the ESPRIT program of the European Community. Prof. Leonard joined the MIT faculty in 1996, after five years as a Post-Doctoral Fellow and Research Scientist in the MIT Sea Grant Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) Laboratory. He has participated in numerous field deployments of AUVs, including under-ice operations in the Arctic and several major experiments in the Mediterranean. He has served an associate editor of the IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering and of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation. He is the recipient of an NSF Career Award (1998), an E.T.S. Walton Visitor Award from Science Foundation Ireland (2004), and the King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Transactions on Robotics Paper Award (2006).