[talks] Anirudha Majumdar talk TODAY

[Mitra Kelly]

Anirudha Majumdar

Control of agile robots in complex environments with formal safety
guarantees Tuesday, February 16th (Today)

3:00 PM Bowen Hall Rm 222

 

The goal of my research is to develop algorithmic and theoretical techniques
that push highly agile robotic systems to the brink of their hardware limits
while guaranteeing that they operate in a safe manner despite uncertainty in
the environment and dynamics.

In this talk, I will describe my work on algorithms for the synthesis of
feedback controllers that come with associated formal guarantees on the
stability of the robot and show how these control-lers and certificates of
stability can be used for robust planning in environments previously un-seen
by the system. In order to make these results possible, my work connects
deeply to compu-tational tools such as sums-of-squares (SOS) programming and
semidefinite programming from the theory of mathematical optimization, along
with approaches from nonlinear control theory.

I will describe this work in the context of the problem of high-speed
unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) flight through cluttered environments
previously unseen by the robot. In this context, the tools I have developed
allow us to guarantee that the robot will fly through its environment in a
collision-free manner despite uncertainty in the dynamics (e.g., wind gusts
or modeling errors). The resulting hardware demonstrations on a fixed-wing
airplane constitute one of the first exam-ples of provably safe and robust
control for robotic systems with complex nonlinear dynamics that need to
plan in realtime in environments with complex geometric constraints.

 

Anirudha Majumdar is a Ph.D. candidate in the Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science de-partment at MIT. He is a member of the Robot Locomotion
Group at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and is advised
by Prof. Russ Tedrake. Ani received his undergraduate degree in Mechanical
Engineering and Mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania, where he
was a member of the GRASP lab. His research is primarily in robotics: he
works on algorithms for controlling highly dynamics robots such as unmanned
aerial vehicles with formal guarantees on the safety of the system. Ani's
research has been recognized by the Siebel Foundation Scholar-ship and the
Best Conference Paper Award at the International Conference on Robotics and
Auto-mation (ICRA) 2013.

 

 

Mitra Kelly

Academic Secretary

Princeton University

Computer Science Dept

35 Olden Street

Princeton NJ 08540

mkelly at cs.princeton.edu

609-258-4562

 

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