Lydia Kavraki
Rice University
Talk Title: Planning Beyond Motion Planning
Abstract: The past two decades have seen incredible advances in practical motion planning algorithms. As perception improves and robust robotics hardware becomes a commodity, modern motion planning is enabling new applications with deep societal impact such as transportation, agriculture, and healthcare. A critical next step is to produce motion from high-level specifications. The latter declare what the robot must do, rather than how the task is to be done. This talk will present recent work in developing integrated frameworks that exploit methods from logical reasoning, optimization theory, artificial intelligence and robotics to produce solutions in manipulation scenarios, and will discuss the challenges that lie ahead.
Bio: Lydia E. Kavraki is the Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science and Bioengineering at Rice University. She obtained her B.A. from the University of Crete in Greece and her Ph.D. from Stanford University. She directs the Rice Computational Robotics Laboratory and leads the NIH/NLM Training Program in Biomedical Informatics under the auspices of the Gulf Coast Consortia in Houston. Her interests are in physical algorithms and their applications in robotics and medicine. Kavraki is the recipient of the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award and the ACM Athena Award, She is a Fellow of ACM, IEEE, AAAS, AAAI, AIMBE, and a member of the National Academy of Medicine.
