Robotics Colloquium: From ideas to implementations - challenges of robot deployment in the field

This week's speaker, Junaed Sattar, will be giving a talk titled "From ideas to implementations: challenges of robot deployment in the field."

Abstract

Field robotics is all about deploying robotic systems in natural, and often hostile, conditions to evaluate their performance in realistic settings. In the case of our Interactive Robotics and Vision Lab, it involves deploying autonomous underwater robots in open-water environments -- open seas and lakes. This talk will try to give some insights into the journey from the drawing board to the dive board, with a focus on highlighting the process of conceiving algorithms for underwater robotics, specifically for visual perception, learning, human-robot interaction, and navigation, to field testing the entire system.

Biography

Junaed Sattar is an assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota and a MnDrive (Minnesota Discovery, Research, and Innovation Economy) faculty, and a member of the Minnesota Robotics Institute. He is the founding director of the Interactive Robotics and Vision Lab, where he and his students investigate problems in field robotics, robot vision, human-robot communication, assisted driving, and applied (deep) machine learning, and develop rugged robotic systems. His graduate degrees are from McGill University in Canada, and he has a BS in Engineering degree from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology. Before coming to the UoM, he worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia where his research focused on human-robot dialog and assistive wheelchair robots, and at Clarkson University in New York as an Assistant Professor. Find him at junaedsattar.info, and the IRV Lab at irvlab.cs.umn.edu, @irvlab on Twitter, and their YouTube page at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbzteddfNPrARE7i1C82NdQ.