Optimality and Robustness in Robotic Exploration

Wed Sep 25, 2024 2:30 p.m.—3:30 p.m.
Exterior of Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall featuring a stone carving of Yale's coat of arms and motto

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Seminar: 
Applied Mathematics

Event time: 
Wednesday, September 25, 2024 - 2:30pm

Location: 
LOM 214

Speaker: 
Ian Abraham

Speaker affiliation: 
Yale University

Event description: 
Effective exploration is a vital component in the success of robotic applications in ocean and space exploration, environmental monitoring, and search and rescue tasks. This talk presents a novel formulation of exploration that permits optimality criteria and performance guarantees for robotic exploration tasks. We define the problem of exploration as a coverage problem on continuous (infinite-dimensional) spaces based on ergodic theory and derive control methods that satisfy various notions of optimality and robustness such as asymptotic coverage, set-invariance, time-optimality, and reachability in exploration tasks. Last, we demonstrate successful execution of the approach on a range robotic systems and present an outlook on novel directions.