Ryan Eustice presents “University of Michigan’s Work Toward Autonomous Cars” as part of the IRIM Robotics Seminar Series. The event will be held in the Marcus Nanotechnology Bldg., Rooms 1116-1118, from 12-1 p.m. and is open to the public.

Abstract

Self-driving test vehicles have become a reality on roadways, and there is an ever-present push toward making them a consumer product in the not-so-distant future. In this talk, I will give an overview of some of our previous work in collaboration with Ford Motor Company in full-scale automated driving. In particular, we’ll look at some of our successes in high-definition map building and precision localization, including our recent work in cross-modality localization using vision within a priori LIDAR maps as well as localization in snow using Gaussian mixture maps. We’ll also discuss our new unique Mcity test facility for connected and automated driving.

Bio

Ryan M. Eustice is an associate professor in the Department of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering at the University of Michigan where he additionally holds joint appointments in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He is the director of the Perceptual Robotics Laboratory (PeRL), a mobile robotics laboratory focused on algorithm development in the areas of robotic perception, navigation, and mapping. His active research projects include applications for autonomous underwater ship hull inspection, multi-vehicle cooperative underwater navigation, benthic high-resolution mapping, and automotive active safety and self-driving capabilities.

Prior to joining the University of Michigan in 2006, Eustice was a postdoctoral scholar at the Dynamical Systems and Controls Lab at The Johns Hopkins University. He holds a B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from Michigan State University (1998) and a Ph.D. in Ocean Engineering from the MIT/WHOI Joint-Program (2005). He is recipient of a NSF CAREER Award and an ONR Young Investigator Award, and he is an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Robotics, and IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, and a former editor of IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering (2010-2015). His work on self-driving cars is conducted in cooperation with Ford Motor Company on the Next Generation Vehicle project.