Seminar: "Field-Hardened Robotic Autonomy"

This talk will present our contributions in the domain of field-hardened resilient robotic autonomy and specifically on multi-modal sensing-degraded GPS-denied localization and mapping, informative path planning, and robust control to facilitate reliable access, exploration, mapping and search of challenging environments such as subterranean settings. The presented work will, among others, emphasize on fundamental developments taking place in the framework of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge and the research of the CERBERUS (https://www.subt-cerberus.org/) team, alongside work on nuclear site characterization and infrastructure inspection.

Website: https://www.autonomousrobotslab.com/

Kostas Alexis obtained his Ph.D. in the field of aerial robotics control and collaboration from the University of Patras, Greece in 2011. His Ph.D. research was supported by the Greek National-European Commission Excellence scholarship. After successfully defending his Ph.D. thesis, he was awarded a Swiss Government fellowship and moved to Switzerland and ETH Zurich. From 2012 to June 2015 he held the position of Senior Researcher at the Autonomous Systems Lab of ETH Zurich, leading the lab efforts in the fields of control and path planning for advanced navigational and operational autonomy. As of summer 2015 he has been an Assistant Professor at the Computer Science & Engineering Department of the University of Nevada, Reno.

Hosted by Dr. Michael Zavlanos