Seminar Homepage
This Week's Seminar
Last Week's Seminar
Seminar Archive
Spring 1998 Schedule

Place and Time
Seminar Abstract
Speaker Biography
Speaker Appointments

Warning
This page is provided for historical and archival purposes only. While the seminar dates are correct, we offer no guarantee of informational accuracy or link validity. Contact information for the speakers, hosts and seminar committee are certainly out of date.

Statistical Techniques for Building Maps With Mobile Robots

Sebastian Thrun
Department of Computer Science and the Robotics Institute
Carnegie Mellon University

Place and Time
Adamson Wing, Baker Hall
Refreshments 3:15 pm
Talk 3:30 pm

Abstract
This talk addresses the problem of building maps of large-scale indoor environments with mobile robots. It poses the map building problem as a constrained, probabilistic maximum-likelihood estimation problem. It then devises practical algorithms for generating the most likely map from data, along with the most likely path taken by the robot. Our currently best algorithm constructs a coarse topological (graph-like) map of the environment, followed by the construction of a metric map with floating-point accuracy. The speaker will present practical results that are, to his knowledge, an order of magnitude better (larger, more accurate) than what previous approaches have been shown to produce. The significance of these results with respect to the speaker's ongoing "robotic museum tour-guide project" will be discussed.

Speaker Biography
Sebastian Thrun is a scientist in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Bonn in 1995. Thrun's research interests include machine learning and robotics.

Speaker Appointments
For appointments, please contact the speaker, Sebastian Thrun, at thrun@cs.cmu.edu.