Professor Sethu Vijayakumar delivers opening keynote of Dev<Talks/>
8th June 2022
Professor Sethu Vijayakumar was invited to present the opening keynote of Dev<Talks/> in Bucharest, Romania. The talk was entitled 'From Automation to Autonomy: AI driving the Future of Interactive Robotics'.
The next generation of robots are going to work much more closely with humans, other robots and interact significantly with the environment around it. As a result, the key paradigms are shifting from isolated decision making systems to one that involves shared control - with significant autonomy devolved to the robot platform; and end-users in the loop making only high level decisions. This talk will briefly introduce powerful machine learning technologies ranging from robust multi-modal sensing, shared representations, scalable real-time learning and adaptation and compliant actuation that are enabling us to reap the benefits of increased autonomy while still feeling securely in control. This also raises some fundamental questions: while the robots are ready to share control, what is the optimal trade-off between autonomy and automation that we are comfortable with? Domains where this debate is relevant include unmanned space exploration, self-driving cars, offshore asset inspection & maintenance, deep sea & autonomous mining, shared manufacturing, exoskeletons/prosthetics for rehabilitation as well as smart cities to list a few.