The Cambrian Explosion of Robotic Intelligence

Talk-Titel: The Cambrian Explosion of Robotic Intelligence

Speaker: Prof. Dr. Abhinav Valada

Abstract: In the last few years, we have seen remarkable progress in AI, from large language models to visual understanding and generation. The key to their success has been leveraging training data at an unprecedented scale and models that are able to learn from such large amounts of data. We are already seeing some examples of applying similar principles to various domains of robotic learning. However, underneath the impressive demo videos that are leading to news headlines and billions in investment, scenes and tasks in them are still carefully curated leading to poor performance in the open world. In this talk, I will discuss our efforts towards open world robot autonomy, where learned models from perception to reasoning, generalize effectively across diverse tasks, robots, environments, and scenarios. These techniques have not only set the state-of-the-art, they have opened doors to a wide variety of new applications in industry. Lastly, I will conclude the talk by presenting our work on ensuring safe, trustworthy, and responsible robot learning, which is crucial for both open world learning and fostering acceptance in society.

Bio: Abhinav Valada is a Full Professor at the University of Freiburg, where he directs the Robot Learning Lab. He is a member of the Department of Computer Science, the BrainLinks-BrainTools center, and a founding faculty of the ELLIS Unit Freiburg. Abhinav is a DFG Emmy Noether AI Fellow, Scholar of the ELLIS Society, and Chair of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Technical Committee on Robot Learning. He received his Ph.D. with distinction from the University of Freiburg and his M.S. in Robotics from The Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. He co-founded and served as the Director of Operations of Platypus LLC, a company developing autonomous robotic boats, and has previously worked at the National Robotics Engineering Center and the Field Robotics Center of Carnegie Mellon University. Abhinav’s research lies at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, and computer vision with a focus on tackling fundamental robot perception, state estimation, and planning problems to enable robots to operate reliably in complex and diverse domains. For his research, he received the IEEE RAS Early Career Award in Robotics and Automation, NVIDIA Research Award, AutoSens Most Novel Research Award, among others. Many aspects of his research have been prominently featured in wider media such as the Discovery Channel, NBC News, Business Times and The Economic Times.

We are with IMBIT this time and meet in the Nexus Lab. Averbis provide beers and bezels after Abhinavs' talk and we invite you to stay for a chat.
Thanks for the support from Averbis and IMBIT!