The Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering

is proud to present

Dr. Luca Carlone

Research Scientist at MIT's Information & Decision Systems Lab

"From Hummingbirds to Honeybees: Algorithms for Agile Micro Aerial Vehicles with On-board Perception”

Monday, February 20 at 12 noon
Montgomery Knight 317

Abstract

Agile micro aerial vehicles will have a massive societal impact over the next decades, creating novel opportunities for large-scale precision agriculture, fast delivery of medical supplies, and disaster response, and providing new perspectives on environmental monitoring and artificial pollination. This future requires the design of robust and lightweight perception algorithms, which interpret sensor data into a coherent world representation, enabling on-board situational awareness and decision-making.

In this talk, I present my work on robust and lightweight robot perception, including the design of algorithms for fast visual-inertial navigation and the development of the first certifiably correct approach for localization and mapping. I also discuss the challenges connected to scaling down perception to nano and pico aerial vehicles, where sensing and computation are subject to strict payload and power constraints. I argue that enabling autonomy on miniaturized platforms requires a paradigm shift in perception, sensing, and communication, and discuss how we can draw inspiration from nature in designing the next generation of flying robots.

About the speaker

Luca Carlone is a research scientist in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before joining MIT, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Georgia Tech (2013-2015), and a visiting researcher at the University of California Santa Barbara (2011). He got his Ph.D. from the Polytechnic University of Turin, Italy, in 2012. His research interests include nonlinear estimation, numerical and distributed optimization, computer vision and probabilistic inference applied to sensing, perception, and control of single and multi robot systems. He published more than 60 papers on international journals and conferences, including a best paper award finalist at RSS 2015 and a best paper award winner at WAFR 2016.