[Apologies for multiple postings]


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*    GRAND Seminar
*    http://cs.gmu.edu/~jmlien/seminar/
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*Title*

United we stand, divided we fall: Integrating Continuous Robot Motion
Planning and Discrete Action Planning

*Time/Venue*

12:00 noon, November 10, Tuesday, 2009, ENGR 4201

*Speaker*

Erion Plaku
Postdoctoral Fellow
Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics
Johns Hopkins University

*Abstract*

Research in robotics has focused since its inception towards increasing
the ability of robots to plan and act on their own in order to complete
assigned high-level tasks.

Toward this goal, this talk presents a multi-layered approach that
automatically and efficiently plans the sequence of motions the robot
needs to execute so that the resulting trajectory is dynamically
feasible, avoids collisions with obstacles, and satisfies a given
high-level specification. In distinction from traditional approaches in
motion planning, the proposed approach can take into account
sophisticated high-level specifications given by Finite State Machines,
Linear Temporal Logic, STRIPS, Hidden Markov Models, and other
planning-domain definition languages. Such expressive models make it
possible to specify complex tasks that frequently arise in navigation,
manipulation, robotic-assisted surgery, search-and-rescue missions.
Initial validation in physics-based simulations with high-dimensional
robotic models demonstrate significant computational speedups over
related work and show the ability of the proposed approach to
efficiently plan valid trajectories that satisfy complex high-level
specifications.

*Bio*

Erion Plaku is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Laboratory for Computational
Sensing and Robotics at Johns Hopkins University. He received the Ph.D.
degree in Computer Science from Rice University in 2008. His research
focuses on motion planning and control of cyber-physical systems for
human-machine cooperative or fully automatic task performance in complex
domains. Some applications include robot navigation, manipulation,
haptic exploration, and robotic-assisted surgery. His research interests
encompass robotics, hybrid systems, AI, logic, data mining, and
large-scale distributed computing.


-- 
*Jyh-Ming Lien*
Assistant Professor, George Mason University
+1-703-993-9546
http://cs.gmu.edu/~jmlien