Speaker: Alessandro Renzaglia (CR Inria, Chroma)

Date: 13/12/2022

Time: 12h15

Place: Amphi Chappe/Lamarr

Title: Cooperative Exploration for 3D Reconstruction with Multiple Aerial Robots

Abstract: Autonomous exploration of unknown environments is a fundamental task in many robotics applications, such as map reconstruction, search and rescue operations, and inspection tasks. For this reason, it is a widely studied problem and several efficient approaches, for both single and multi-robot systems, have been proposed over the years. However, most of the existing solutions focus on 2D areas, while complex 3D environments still present several problems to be solved. In this talk, I will present some of the challenges of exploring 3D environments with a fleet of cooperating aerial vehicles and discuss different ways to quantify the expected new information contained in unexplored portions of the map and to take into account potential redundancies in the observations. Finally, I will briefly discuss the case, common in inspection tasks, where not all areas to explore are equally informative, but some regions have a higher priority and introduce a search dimension to the classical exploration task.

Bio: Alessandro Renzaglia is a research faculty member in the Chroma team at Inria Lyon / CITI Lab. He received his M.Sc. degree in Physics from the University of Rome La Sapienza, Italy, and his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Grenoble, France. Successively he has been Postdoctoral Researcher with the Computer Science & Engineer Department at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA, and later with the Laboratory for Analysis and Architecture of Systems (LAAS), Toulouse, France, in the Robotics and Interactions group, before to join the Chroma team. His main research interests include multi-robot systems, path planning, and optimization.