25 September 2024 From Mystery to Mastery Tiny Robot Autonomy using the Manifestation of the Unknown

The human fascination to mimic ultra-efficient living beings like insects and birds has led to the rise of small autonomous robots. Smaller robots are safer, more agile and are task distributable as swarms. One might wonder, why do we not have small robots deployed in the wild today? Smaller robots are constrained by a severe dearth of computation and sensor quality. To further exacerbate the situation, today's mainstream approach for autonomy on small robots relies on building a 3D map of the scene that is used to plan paths for executing a control algorithm. Such a methodology has severely bounded the potential of small autonomous robots due to the strict distinction between perception, planning, and control. Instead, we re-imagine each agent by drawing inspiration from insects at the bottom of the size and computation spectrum. Specifically, each of our agents comprises a series of hierarchical competencies built on bio-inspired sensorimotor AI loops by utilizing the action-perception synergy. Here, the agent controls its movement and physical interaction to make up for its lack of computation and sensing. Such an approach imposes additional constraints on the data gathered to solve the problem using Active and Interactive Perception. To unify the class of motion problems, we present a method to exploit the unknown, i.e., the uncertainty of the predictions to obtain additional informational cues in a new theory called Novel Perception that utilizes the statistics of motion fields to tackle various classes of problems from navigation and interaction. This method has the potential to be the go-to mathematical formulation for tackling the class of motion-field-based problems in robotics and made it into the cover of Science Robotics journal.
Prof. Nitin J. Sanket is currently an Assistant Professor in Robotics Engineering and heads the Perception and autonomous Robotics Group (PeAR) with affiliations to Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (pronounced as Wuster). He received his M.S. in Robotics from the University of Pennsylvania's GRASP lab, where he worked with Prof. Kostas Daniildis on developing a benchmark for indoor to outdoor visual-inertial odometry systems. He was an Assistant Clinical Professor in the First-Year Innovation and Research Experience and a Postdoctoral fellow in the Perception and Robotics Group at the University of Maryland, College Park. During this time, he worked with Prof. Yiannis Aloimonos and Dr. Cronelia Fermuller on developing Bio-inspired AI frameworks using the Action-Perception Synergy for resource-constrained tiny mobile robots. His doctoral thesis won the Larry S. Davis Award and the MDPI Drones Ph.D. Thesis award. He is also a recipient of the Dean's Fellowship, Future Faculty Fellowship, Ann G. Wylie fellowship and was the Maryland Robotics center student ambassador. He has also taught courses, including hands-on aerial robotics and vision, planning and control in aerial robotics. Nitin is currently an Associate Editor for the Nature npj Robotics and IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters Journals. He is also a reviewer for Science Robotics, RA-L, T-ASE, IMAVIS, CVPR, ICRA, RSS, IROS, SIGGRAPH and many other top journals and conferences. His work has been featured in a wide range of mass media including the cover of Science Robotics, BBC Earth, Voice of America, IEEE Spectrum, Mashable, and TechXplore to name a few. During his free time, Prof. Sanket is also an award-winning photographer with his photographs featured in National Geographic favorites among others.