Friday, December 08, 2006

Raja Chatila - Robot Navigation

Talking Robots - Raja Chatila on Robot Navigation

In this episode we interview Raja Chatila on the state of the art in robot navigation, on how to marry traditional Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) with bio-inspired, reactive approaches, and on why your living room is more complex to navigate than an extraterrestrial planet.

Dr. Chatila is a professor at the Laboratoire d'Analyse et d'Architecture des Systemes (LAAS) in Toulouse, France, which is part of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientific (CNRS). He is very well known for robot control and navigation, and has designed robots that walk, drive and fly in outdoor environments, on factory floors, inside the home, and on extra-terrestrial planets.

His research interests include robot understanding of space, objects and situations, robot decision making, and robot learning and interaction. He is currently working on projects that involve assistant and companion robots (COGNIRON) and on planetary rovers (EDEN).

Links:

1 Comments:

  • Anonymous Anonymous said on 12/16/2006 12:38 PM  

    I agree with Prof Chatila that understanding the environment is the major problem in robot navigation. I would even go a step further and call it one of the major - if not the major - problem in all of robotics!

    It is interesting that Prof Chatila talked about manipulation of objects in the second part of the interview. He did not make the connection, but could it be that getting robots to interact with their environment is the key to solving the problem of understanding?

    Great series, by the way, keep it up!

    Tom Boston

Post a Comment

<< Home


All interviews

2008

2007

2006

current posts

 
Published: 15.9.2006/dm        Last update: 14.10.2009/mw        Contact the webmaster