CRAY Colloquium: Learning Coordinated, Performant, and Safe Flight with 20 Neurons

The computer science colloquium takes place on Mondays from 11:15 a.m. - 12:15 p.m. This week's speaker, Gaurav Sukhatme (University of Southern California), will be giving a talk titled "Learning Coordinated, Performant, and Safe Flight with 20 Neurons"

Abstract

We have recently demonstrated the possibility of learning controllers that are zero-shot transferable to groups of real quadrotors via large-scale, multi-agent, end-to-end reinforcement learning. We train policies parameterized by neural networks that can control individual drones in a group in a fully decentralized manner. Our policies, trained in simulated environments with realistic quadrotor physics, demonstrate advanced flocking behaviors, perform aggressive maneuvers in tight formations while avoiding collisions with each other, break and re-establish formations to avoid collisions with moving obstacles, and efficiently coordinate in pursuit-evasion tasks. The model learned in simulation transfers to highly resource-constrained physical quadrotors. Motivated by these results and the observation that neural control of memory-constrained, agile robots requires small yet highly performant models, the talk will conclude with some thoughts on coaxing learned models onto devices with modest computational capabilities.

Biography

Gaurav S. Sukhatme is Professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC). He is the inaugural Director of the USC School of Advanced Computing and the Executive Vice Dean of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. He holds the Donald M. Aldstadt Chair in Advanced Computing and was the Chairman of the USC Computer Science Department from 2012-17. He earned a B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Bombay and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from USC. He is the co-director of the USC Robotics Research Laboratory and directs the USC Robotic Embedded Systems Laboratory. His research is in networked robots, learning robots, and field robotics. He is a Fellow of the AAAI, AAAS, and the IEEE, a recipient of the NSF CAREER award, the Okawa Foundation research award, and an Amazon research award. He is one of the founders of the Robotics: Science and Systems conference and was the program chair of 2005 RSS 2005, ICRA 2008 and IROS 2011. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Autonomous Robots (Springer Nature).