题  目：Visual Robot Navigation – Overview and recent developments

报告人：Prof. Hong Zhang (加拿大Univ. of Alberta教授 / 广东工大特聘教授）

时间：  2019年11月13日（星期三）15:00-16:30

地点：  广东工业大学大学城校区工学二号馆二楼学术报告厅

Abstract

There exists a tremendous demand for mobile robots, to function effectively in various environments and across multiple application domains: on factory floors and disaster-affected areas, in homes and hospitals, indoors and outdoors.  In response to this demand, significant efforts have been made in recent years on mobile robotics research.  One area of remarkable progress is the use of visual sensing for a mobile robot to learn about - and localize itself within - an unknown environment.  This progress is mostly attributed to the rich textural information in visual sensory data, the low cost and proliferation of cameras, as well as the great strides made in visual perception algorithms.  In this talk, I will give an overview and present our recent research in visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), highlighting the development of robust algorithms for a visual front-end of a SLAM system.  I will discuss our recent work in exploiting the tremendous success of deep learning in visual data processing, towards resolving several key challenges to the development of robust visual robot navigation solutions.  

Short Bio:

Professor Hong Zhang received his B.S. from Northeastern University (Boston) in 1982, and Ph.   D. from Purdue University in 1986, both in Electrical Engineering. Subsequently, he conducted research at the University of Pennsylvania as a post-doctoral fellow before joining the University of Alberta, Canada where he is currently a Professor in the Department of Computing Science.  

Professor Zhang’s research interests include robotics, computer vision, and image processing, with over 200 publications in these areas. For the past 15 years, he has focused on the study of mobile robot navigation with visual sensing. He is a principal investigator in the NSERC Canadian robotics network (NCRN) (2018-2023) - whose mandate is to develop the science and technologies to allow mobile robots to work in challenging environments, and to generate and communicate critical information to humans.  He is also a PI with Centre for Autonomous Systems (2018-2022), a multimillion dollar research initiative funded by Alberta government, to study issues and explore opportunities in autonomous and self-driving technologies.

Professor Zhang held a prestigious NSERC Industrial Research Chair from 2003 to 2017. He was the General Chair of 2017 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), in Vancouver, Canada, and was on the Senior Program Committee of ICRA 2019 and IROS 2019.  He is serving as the Secretary of IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (2018-2019), and has been appointed to a three-term as the Editor-in-Chief of IROS Conference Editorial Board (2020-2022). In recognition of his accomplishments, he is elected Fellow of the IEEE, and Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering.