ELLIS Delft Talk by Javier Alonso-Mora

(NOTE: the meeting moved from 5th -> 12th)

This will be a hybrid meeting
This meeting is open for all interested researchers.

Motion Planning among Decision-Making Agents: Trajectory Optimization with Learned Cost Functions

Abstract

We move towards an era of smart cities, where autonomous vehicles will provide on-demand transportation while making our streets safer and mobile robots will coexist with humans. The motion plan of mobile robots and autonomous vehicles must, therefore, account for the interaction with other agents and consider that they are, as well, decision-making entities. For example, when humans drive a car, they are fully aware of their environment and how other drivers and pedestrians may react to their future actions.

Towards this objective I will discuss several methods for motion planning and multi-robot coordination that leverage constrained optimization and reinforcement learning to achieve interactive behaviors with safety guarantees. Namely: using inverse reinforcement learning and social value estimation to achieve social behaviors; employing a learned policy to guide the motion planner in dense traffic scenarios or for information gathering; achieving social trajectories by learning a cost function from a dataset of human-driven vehicles; and learning to communicate the relevant information for multi-robot coordination. The methods are of broad applicability, including autonomous vehicles and aerial vehicles.

Bio

Javier Alonso-Mora is an Associate Professor at the Department of Cognitive Robotics of the Delft University of Technology, the director of the Autonomous Multi-robots Laboratory, a Principal Investigator at the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions and co-founder of The Routing Company. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Associate at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab

(CSAIL) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. degree in robotics from ETH Zurich, in partnership with Disney Research Zurich. He serves as associate editor for Springer Autonomous Robots, and has served as associate editor for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, the Publications Chair for the IEEE International Symposium on Multi-Robot and Multi-Agent Systems 2021 and associate editor for ICRA, IROS and ICUAS. He is the recipient of several prizes and grants, including an ERC Starting Grant (2021), the ICRA Best Paper Award on Multi-robot Systems (2019), an Amazon Research Award (2019) and a talent scheme VENI award from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (2017). More info: https://www.autonomousrobots.nl/

To join this event, please contact Frans Oliehoek.