Lockheed Martin Robotics Seminar, October 8, 2021: Maggie Wigness

Lockheed Martin Robotics Seminar: Human-Centered Machine Learning for Autonomous Navigation

Maggie Wigness
Computer Scientist
Combat Capabilities Development Command
Army Research Laboratory

Data-driven AI/ML techniques have advanced significantly to automate skills such as detection, target recognition, and mobility. Yet, there are many applications, such as military operation or humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, where it is highly likely that the operating domain will depict some distributional shift from that in which a system was trained. Under these scenarios, the design of AI systems that can be trained or refined quickly, potentially in real-time, becomes critically important to ensure safety and success. I will discuss how we are incorporating learning from human demonstration to address the need for efficient, on-line learning in the field. I will specifically focus on several approaches to learn navigation behaviors for unmanned ground robots using teleoperation demonstrations, allowing for non-expert users to refine ML reward functions with relatively little effort.

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