June 17 Lecture – Cars that coordinate with people

Cars that coordinate with people

with Anca Dragan

Sat June 17, 2017 – 11am

100 Genetics and Plant Biology, UC Berkeley

Autonomous cars tend to treat people like obstacles whose motion needs to be anticipated, so that the car can best stay out of their way. This results in ultra-defensive cars that cannot coordinate with people, because they miss on a key aspect of coordination: it’s not just the car interpreting and responding to the actions of people, people also interpret and respond to the car’s actions. Professor Dragan will introduce a mathematical formulation of interaction that accounts for this, and show how learning and optimal control can be leveraged to generate car behavior that results in natural coordination strategies, like the car negotiating a merge or inching forward at an intersection to test whether it can go.

 

 

Anca Dragan is an Assistant Professor in the EECS Department at UC Berkeley. Her goal is to enable robots to work with, around, and in support of people. She runs the InterACT Lab, which focuses on algorithms for human-robot interaction — algorithms that move beyond the robot’s function in isolation, and generate robot behavior that also accounts for interaction and coordination with end-users. The InterACT Lab works across different applications, from assistive robots, to manufacturing, to autonomous cars, and draw from optimal control, planning, estimation, learning, and cognitive science. Professor Dragan also helped found and serve on the steering committee for the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Lab, and she is a co-PI of the Center for Human-Compatible AI.