Learn all about visual navigation in robots

In our February meetup, sponsored by Intel, we’ll talk about navigation and robots. We’ll get to hear two different perspectives - one from the company who built a product and second from a company who supplied the chipset.

Location:

Intel-Santa Clara. SC-12 auditorium.
3600 Juliette Lane, Santa Clara, CA

Date: February 13, 2019
Time: 6PM -845PM

Agenda:
6-7 PM: Networking and Pizza
7-705PM: Welcome message
705-750PM: First presentation and QA
750-835PM: Second presentation and QA
835-845PM: Networking and wrap up

Presentation 1: Designing navigation on a real life robot: lessons learned
Speaker 1: Rachit Bhargava, Marble.io

Marble provides robots based solutions for delivery of grocery, meals and parcels and makes it affordable, environmentally friendly and reliable. This involves developing robots to deal with complexities associated with autonomously navigating on sidewalks. This talk focuses on experiences in adopting RealSense to address these challenges and an overview of how it contributed to the various pieces of the robot's navigation system. The presentation will also talk about Marble's experiences with integrating Real Sense in the software stack from a stability and reliability perspective.

Speaker Bio: Rachit Bhargava is a founding robotics engineer at Marble Robot Inc where he works on developing perception algorithms for the navigation system. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a Master's degree in Robotics and was part of the GRASP laboratory. Before that he was part of the Robotics Research Center at IIIT Hyderabad working on planning algorithms for space robots and SLAM for ground robots.

Presentation 2: Visual navigation for wheeled autonomous robots
Speaker 2: Philip Schmidt, Intel
Robotics navigation is a key challenge that needs to be addressed by anyone designing autonomous robots. Philip Schmidt from Intel will provide a quick introduction to SLAM and sensor-fusion algorithms. He will then provide an overview of latest Intel RealSense cameras and demo how they are being used on a robot to navigate and perform obstacle avoidance. He will also walk through some sample code for better understanding of these capabilities.

Speaker Bio: Phillip Schmidt is a software engineer in the Intel RealSense Group where he has been working on algorithms for SLAM and sensor fusion for robotic applications. He holds a master’s degree in control engineering from the University of Stuttgart, Germany, and, before joining Intel, was a research engineer at the German Aerospace Agency (DLR) where he developed algorithms for robot vision, estimation & control.