Prof. Dinesh Manocha, University of Maryland College Park  gave  KCIS Distinguished Lecture on Robot Navigation in Complex Indoor and Outdoor Environments on 9 April.

Prof. Dinesh Manocha is Paul Chrisman-Iribe Chair in Computer Science & ECE and Distinguished University Professor at University of Maryland College Park. His research interests include virtual environments, physically based modeling, and robotics. His group has developed a number of software packages that are standard and licensed to 60+ commercial vendors. He has published more than 800 papers and supervised 52 Ph.D dissertations. He is a Fellow of AAAI, AAAS, ACM, IEEE, and NAI and member of ACM SIGGRAPH and IEEE VR Academies, and Bézier Award from Solid Modeling Association.

In his talk, he mentioned how in the last few decades, most robotics success stories have been limited to structured or controlled environments. A major challenge is to develop robot systems that can operate in complex or unstructured environments corresponding to homes, dense traffic, outdoor terrains, public places, etc. He provided an overview of ongoing work on developing robust planning and navigation technologies that use recent advances in computer vision, sensor technologies, machine learning,  and motion planning algorithms. He presented new methods that utilize multi-modal observations from an RGB camera, 3D LiDAR, and robot odometry for scene perception, along with deep reinforcement learning for reliable planning.  The latter is also used to compute dynamically feasible and spatial aware velocities for a robot navigating among mobile obstacles and uneven terrains. He explained how to integrate these methods with wheeled robots, home robots, and legged platforms and highlighted their performance in crowded indoor scenes, home environments, and dense outdoor terrains.

During his visit, he interacted with RRC faculty and students on their ongoing projects.

April 2025