University of Washington’s Dieter Fox presents “Toward Robots that Understand People and Their Environment” as part of the IRIM Robotics Seminar Series. The event will be held in the TSRB Banquet Hall from 12-1 p.m. and is open to the public. 

Abstract

To interact and collaborate with people in a natural way, robots must be able to recognize objects in their environments, accurately track the actions of humans, and estimate their goals and intentions. The last years have seen strong improvements in robotic capabilities to model, detect, and track non-rigid objects such as human bodies, hands, and their own manipulators.  These recent developments can serve as the basis for providing robots with an unprecedented understanding of their environment and the people therein. I will use examples from our research on modeling, detecting, and tracking articulated objects to highlight some of these advances and discuss open problems that still need to be addressed.

Bio

Dieter Fox is a professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, where he heads the UW Robotics and State Estimation Lab. From 2009 to 2011, he was also director of the Intel Research Labs Seattle. He currently serves as the academic PI of the Intel Science and Technology Center for Pervasive Computing hosted at UW.  Fox obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Bonn, Germany. Before joining the faculty of UW, he spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher at the CMU Robot Learning Lab. Fox’s research is in robotics and artificial intelligence with a focus on state estimation and perception applied to various problems in robotics and activity recognition. He has published more than 150 technical papers and is the co-author of the textbook “Probabilistic Robotics.” He is an IEEE Fellow, a fellow of the AAAI, and he received several best paper awards at major robotics, AI, and computer vision conferences. He was an editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, program co-chair of the 2008 AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, and program chair of the 2013 Robotics: Science and Systems conference.