Greetings from the
AI, ML and Friends Seminar at the Australian National University in Canberra, where
Dr. Zak Kingston from
Rice University is speaking on "Scaling Multi-Modal Planning".
That doesn't sound very exciting, but he is speaking from the USA, where he has been planning how to use a robot on the International Space Station. Robots can help with routine housekeeping tasks, on a space station, and presumably on earth, but it is tedious to have to program the robot to make every tiny motion. That works fine for a production line, where every car body will be locked into the same place, with an area reserved for the robot. But Dr. Kingston explained a space station is a confined space cluttered with stuff, which gets moved about. He is describing the use of the
Open Motion Planning Library (OMPL) to solve this problem.
This work has application for the Australian Defence Force. Suppliers to the ADF are working on ships, and submarines designed to be
operated without a crew for weeks. These drone submarines and ships will need routine maintenance while at sea, with no one on board. A robot sailor could save the vessel having return to port to have a minor problem fixed.
No comments:
Post a Comment