Stanford AA289/ENGR319 - Robotics and Autonomous Systems Seminar - Stanford Seminar - Democratizing Robot Learning

Dr. Matthew Gombolay, Assistant Professor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology November 18, 2022 New advances in robotics and autonomy offer a promise of revitalizing final assembly manufacturing, assisting in personalized at-home healthcare, and even scaling the power of earth-bound scientists for robotic space exploration. Yet, in real-world applications, autonomy is often run in the O-F-F mode because researchers fail to understand the human in human-in-the-loop systems. In this talk, I will share exciting research we are conducting at the nexus of human factors engineering and cognitive robotics to inform the design of human-robot interaction. In my talk, I will focus on our recent work on: 1) enabling machines to learn skills from and model heterogeneous, suboptimal human decision-makers 2) “white-box” that knowledge through explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques 3) scale to coordinated control of stochastic human-robot teams The goal of this research is to inform the design of autonomous teammates so that users want to turn – and benefit from turning – to the O-N mode. About the speaker: Dr. Matthew Gombolay is an Assistant Professor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the Johns Hopkins University in 2011, an S.M. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT in 2013, and a Ph.D. in Autonomous Systems from MIT in 2017. Gombolay’s research interests span robotics, AI/ML, human-robot interaction, and operations research. Between defending his dissertation and joining the faculty at Georgia Tech, Dr. Gombolay served as a technical staff member at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, transitioning his research to the U.S. Navy, earning him an R&D 100 Award. His publication record includes a best paper award from American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics, a finalist for best student paper at the American Controls Conference, and a finalist for best paper at the Conference on Robot Learning. Dr Gombolay was selected as a DARPA Riser in 2018, received 1st place for the Early Career Award from the National Fire Control Symposium, and was awarded a NASA Early Career Fellowship for increasing science autonomy in space. Learn more here: https://core-robotics.gatech.edu/people/matthew-gombolay/ #robots #robotics