Abstract
Autonomous robots are becoming increasingly prevalent in our daily existence, from navigating our roads and sky, assisting in households and warehouses, conducting daring search and rescue missions, and even exploring the frontiers of space. Yet building robots that can safely and fluently interact with humans in a trusted manner remains an elusive task. Ensuring robots can keep a sufficiently safe distance from humans is at odds with fluent interactions, yet humans are remarkable at seamlessly avoiding collision in crowded settings. In this talk, we will study how humans engage in safe and fluent multi-agent interactions and how this can be applied to robot decision-making and control. In the first half of the talk, I will introduce the notion of safety concepts and demonstrate how we can tractably synthesize data-driven safety concepts using control theoretic tools as inductive biases. These data-driven safety concepts are designed to capture how humans think about safety in real-world scenarios more accurately. In the second half, I will present recent work investigating how fluent motion can lead to safer interactions. Specifically, I will show that legible and proactive robot behavior can lead to prosocial interactions. This talk aims to revisit how safety is defined and rethink how safety and fluency can be more compatible with one another in human-robot interactions.
Bio
Karen Leung is an Assistant Professor and the Vagners & Christianson Endowed Faculty Fellow in Aeronautics & Astronautics at the University of Washington. She directs the Control and Trustworthy Robotics Lab (CTRL) which focuses on developing safe, intelligent, and trustworthy autonomous systems that can operate seamlessly with, alongside, and around humans. Before joining UW, Karen was a research scientist at NVIDIA, working in the Autonomous Vehicle Research Group, where she currently holds a partial appointment. Karenreceived her M.S. and Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford University, and a combined B.S./B.E. in Mathematics and Aerospace Engineering from the University of Sydney, Australia. She is a recipient of the UW + Amazon Science Hub Faculty Research Award and received the William F. Ballhaus Prize for Best Ph.D. Thesis Award.
