"Deploying autonomous vehicles for micro-mobility on a university campus"

Thursday 13 January @ 11AM PST

Join Zoom Meeting:  https://ucsd.zoom.us/j/99055507432

Speaker: Henrik Christensen

Seminar Abstract

Abstract: Autonomous vehicles are already deployed on the inter-states. Providing robust autonomous systems for urban environments is a different challenge, as the road network is more complex, there are many more types of road-users (cars, bikes, pedestrians, …) and the potential interactions are more complex. In an urban environment it is also harder to use pre-computed HD-maps as the world is much more dynamic. We have studied the design of micro-mobility solutions for the UCSD campus. In this presentation we will discuss an overall systems design, trying to eliminate HD-maps and replace it with course topological maps such as OpenStreet Maps, fusing vision and lidar for semantic mapping /localization, detection and handling other road-users. The system has been deployed for a 6-month period to evaluate robustness across weather, season changes, etc. We will present both underlying methods, and experimental insight.

Bio:

Henrik I Christensen is the Qualcomm Chancellor’s Chair of Robot Systems and the director of robotics at UC San Diego. Dr. Christensen does research on a systems approach to robotics. Solutions need a solid theoretical basis, effective algorithms, a good implementation and be evaluated in realistic scenarios. He has made contributions to distributed systems, SLAM, and systems engineering. Henrik is also the main editor of the US National Robotics Roadmap. He is / has served on a significant number of editorial boards (PAMI, IJRR, JFR, RAS, Aut Sys, …).