ADELPHI, Md. --- Researchers at the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command Research Laboratory and the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University developed a new technique to quickly teach robots novel traversal behaviors with minimal human oversight.
Two lab researchers, Drs. Maggie Wigness and John Rogers, engaged in face-to-face discussions with hundreds of conference attendees during their two and a half hour interactive presentation.
The Research Lab and CMU researchers focused their initial investigation on learning robot traversal behaviors with respect to the robot's visual perception of terrain and objects in the environment.
While similar research exists in the field of robotics, the work the lab is doing is especially unique.
"The challenges and operating scenarios that we focus on here at the Research Lab (ARL) are extremely unique compared to other research being performed," Wigness said. "We seek to create intelligent robotic systems that reliably operate in warfighter environments, meaning the scene is highly unstructured, possibly noisy, and we need to do this given relatively little a priori knowledge of the current state of the environment.
The fact that our problem statement is so different than so many other researchers allows the lab to make a huge impact in autonomous systems research. Our techniques, by the very definition of the problem, must be robust to noise and have the ability to learn with relatively small amounts of data."
"The lab (ARL) is positioned to actively collaborate with other members of the RCTA, leveraging the efforts of top researchers in academia to work on Army problems," Rogers said. "This particular research effort was the synthesis of several components of the RCTA with our internal research; it would not have been possible if we didn't work together so closely."