Event Date
Dr. Dan Negrut from University of Wisconsin-Madison will give a seminar entitled: Designing autonomous robots via simulation. How it goes, and why it doesn’t go far enough yet. The holy grail in autonomous robot design is to synthesize the robot and its autonomy stack entirely in simulation, and then successfully deploy it in the real world. Simulation can reduce both costs and time-to-market, and can be used to automatically generate ground-truth labels for training AI solutions, thereby creating smarter robots. To achieve this, one must simulate various elements: the robot's motion, the sensors it employs, the environment in which it operates, the actuation process laden with delays and errors, and the coordination of perception, path planning, and controls within the autonomy stack. This talk will report on some successes to date and discuss the challenges that make it difficult for a real-world robot to match the behavior of its digital twin. Topics touched upon will include real-time simulation, human-robot interaction, and multi-agent simulation scenarios.