Philip Dames, Temple: Developing and Deploying Situational Awareness in Autonomous Robotic Systems

Speaker: Philip Dames, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Director of the Temple Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Lab (TRAIL) at Temple University
Presentation Title: Developing and Deploying Situational Awareness in Autonomous ​Robotic Systems
Date and Time: Friday, November 15 at 12:00 PM CT
Location: Tech IEMS C211 and Zoom
Abstract:
Robotic systems must possess sufficient situational awareness in order to successfully operate in complex and dynamic real-world environments. In this talk, I will first describe how multi-target tracking (MTT) algorithms can provide mobile robots with this awareness. Next, I will discuss two key applications of MTT to mobile robotics. The first problem is distributed target search and tracking. To solve this, we develop a distributed MTT framework that scales to large teams and task assignment strategies that automatically balance the workload across a team. The second problem is autonomous navigation through dynamic social spaces filled with people. To solve this, we develop a novel neural network-based controller that takes as its input the target tracks from an MTT, unlike previous approaches which only rely on raw sensor data.​
Bio:
Philip Dames is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Temple University, where he directs the Temple Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Lab (TRAIL). Prior to joining Temple, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher in Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his PhD Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2015 and his BS and MS degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Northwestern University in 2010. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award. His research aims to improve robots’ ability to operate in complex, real-world environments to address societal needs.