October 18, 2024, Webb Hall 1100

Factor graphs have been very successful in providing a lingua franca in which to phrase robotics perception and navigation problems. In this talk I will re-visit some of those successes, also discussed in depth in a recent Annual Reviews article. I will also show more recent work centered on using factor graphs for action. I will discuss our efforts in motion planning, trajectory optimization, optimal control, and model-predictive control, highlighting in each how factor graphs provide an intuitive and natural framework in which to think about these problems and generate state of the art solutions.

Frank Dellaert is a Professor at Georgia Tech's School of Interactive Computing, currently on leave as CTO of Verdant Robotics. He has previously done stints at Skydio, a drone startup, Facebook Reality Labs, and most recently Google AI. His work is on sensor fusion and the use of large-scale graphical models for robotics sensing, thinking, and acting. With his students and collaborators, he created the popular sensor fusion/SLAM library GTSAM, see gtsam.org.