The Rutgers Computer Science Department is excited to share that PhD student Edgar Granados has been awarded the Nokia Bell Scholarship for his work in finding ways to enhance robotic decision-making with factor graphs. The Nokia Bell Labs Scholarship is a program sponsored by Nokia Bell Labs in partnership with select universities in the U.S. and abroad to support promising postgraduate trainees in artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer science, engineering, networking, and communications. At Rutgers, this program is administered through the Office for Research via a competitive, merit-based application process open to eligible PhD students across all four chancellor-led units.
Reliable robotic systems must implement motion planning, state estimation, and control algorithms, and a robot model is needed. These operations are typically addressed independently and can lead to unsafe execution due to sensing and actuation noise and discrepancies between the model and reality. While sensors and actuators keep improving, and system identification techniques can reduce the model gap, the discrepancies persist, for example, in unmodeled environments or due to wear and tear.
"My research seeks to integrate these methods by using factor graphs as a common framework. Factor graphs provide significant advantages by enforcing the problem's structure while allowing explainability. Specifically, factor graph representations of the robot dynamics allow significant speed-ups of optimization algorithms for state estimation and control. For long-horizon planning, however, a kinodynamic motion planner is needed, where the planner must produce the factor graph to be used by the state estimation and control algorithms," said Granados.
A common representation, from system dynamics to planning, allows for computationally efficient and explainable algorithms without sacrificing accuracy.
The Nokia Bell Labs Scholarship provides $10,000 to each recipient during a 1-year term. Up to three recipients will be selected per annual cycle. In addition to the monetary award, scholarship recipients will be eligible for mentorship opportunities with Nokia Bell Labs scientists and invitations to Nokia Bell Labs-sponsored lectures and other events.
