Events

Developing Simulation Tools with an Eye Towards Designing Robots and Autonomous Vehicles

Speaker: Dan Negrut

Location: 60 Fifth Avenue, Room C15

Date: Tuesday, January 17, 2023

This talk is using computer simulation to design robots and autonomous vehicles, and is inspired by the following vision. One can design an autonomous robot by experimenting with control policies, perception algorithms, and state estimators that look promising. Alternatively, to design the brain of the robot, one can take a model of the robot and test through simulation the promising perception, planning, and control algorithms. The algorithms of choice are subsequently deployed on the actual robots.

On paper, the simulation route is great - it cuts costs, it is fast, thorough, and safe. Sometimes, it is the only feasible alternative. However, designs synthesized in simulation often fail to transfer to the actual robot, a manifestation of the so-called sim-to-real gap. This talk dwells on two things: (i) an open source software infrastructure called Chrono, which we develop and use to simulate the robot, the sensors on the robot, and the virtual world in which the robot/autonomous vehicle operates; and (ii) how to factor in the human component, to understand the human-robot and/or human-automation interplay.