Challenges & opportunities in robotics: from self driving cars to the micro- and nano-scale?

In this talk, John Leonard briefly describes some of the challenges and opportunities in autonomous robotics, with a focus on self-driving cars. Some of the major challenges in include high-resolution 3D mapping, fusing data from multiple types of sensors, and achieving robust decision-making with uncertain perception data. He also presents some thoughts on applying some of the techniques used in self-driving, such as simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), to micro- and nano-scale environments.

Dr. John J. Leonard is the Samuel C. Collins Professor in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering 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 and underwater vehicles.