HOUSTON, Texas - Dr. Wolfram Burgard, TRI VP of Automated Driving Technology delivered a presentation to the Ken Kennedy Institute at Rice University on "Probabilistic and Machine Learning Approaches for Autonomous Robots and Automated Driving"

The capability to robustly perceive environments and to execute actions is the ultimate goal in the areas of autonomous robots and automated driving. The key challenge is that there are no sensors and no actuators that are perfect, which means that robots and cars need the ability to properly deal with the resulting uncertainty. In this presentation, Wolfram delivers an introduction to the probabilistic approach to robotics, which includes a rigorous statistical methodology to deal with the perception and planning and explains how this approach can be extended using state-of-the-art technology from machine learning to bring us closer to the development of truly robust systems that are able to serve us in our every-day life.