Abstract:
Symbiotic Autonomy for Effective Service Robots

Manuela M. Veloso
Computer Science Department
Carnegie Mellon University

We envision ubiquitous autonomous mobile robots that can help and coexist with humans performing tasks to service humans.
Such robots are still far from common, as our environments offer great challenges to robust robot perception, cognition, and action.
We realize the envisioned robot and human coexistence as offering a symbiotic human-robot interaction, such that we view robots and humans with complementary limitations and expertise. Furthermore we introduce the ability for the robots to access the information available in the internet. I will present CoBot and the tasks it can perform. I will present CoBot's effective mobile robot indoor localization and navigation algorithms, as well as its interaction with the humans in the environment. I will illustrate CoBot's performance with examples of autonomous hours-long runs of the robot in our buildings.
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Bio:
Manuela M. Veloso is Herbert A. Simon Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.  She has courtesy Professor appointments in the Robotics Institute, in the Machine Learning Department, in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, and in the Mechanical Engineering Department. Professor Veloso founded and directs the CORAL research laboratory, for the study of multiagent systems where agents Collaborate, Observe, Reason, Act, and Learn, www.cs.cmu.edu/~coral. Professor Veloso is Fellow of IEEE, Fellow of AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science), and Fellow of AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence). She is the President-Elect of AAAI and she was the President of the RoboCup Federation for the last three years, and of which she continues to be a member of the Board of Trustees. Professor Veloso was recently recognized by the Chinese Academy of Sciences as Einstein Chair Professor. She also received the 2009 ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award for her contributions to agents in uncertain and dynamic environments, including distributed robot localization and world modeling, strategy selection in multiagent systems in the presence of adversaries, and robot learning from demonstration. Professor Veloso is the author of one book on "Planning by Analogical Reasoning" and editor of several other books. She is also an author in over 280 journal articles and conference papers.