CICS Assistant Professor Joydeep Biswas Granted Amazon Research Award

Assistant Professor Joydeep Biswas has recently been awarded an Amazon Research Award of $80,000 to fund his research on modeling dynamic human environments for robot perception.

"Autonomous mobile robots need to accurately and robustly reason about their location in the environment, along with the locations of other movable objects, to perform tasks accurately," said Biswas. "However, localization in real human environments over extended periods of time is challenging, since the environment changes often. Such changes include changes to the geometry due to movable and deformable objects, and changes in appearance due to lighting and weather changes."

According to Biswas, the key insight underlying his solution is the realization that the objects responsible for changes in the environment are often also the same objects that mobile robots need to detect and track to effectively execute their tasks. His work aims to jointly model and track the many distinct movable objects that compose the world, while simultaneously reasoning about the location of the robot.

His approach has the potential to solve several robot perception problems in a single, principled manner, naturally fusing together a number of perception problems that are conventionally tackled independently, including robot localization and mapping.

"The potential impact of this research is varied," said Biswas. "It will benefit not only service mobile robots deployed in everyday human environments, but it also has the potential to help autonomous cars navigate in a changing world with reduced reliance on up-to-date maps."

Assistant Professor Joydeep Biswas joined the College of Information and Computer Sciences in the fall of 2015, where he now focuses his research on perception, planning, and control applied to long-term autonomous mobile robots. Biswas received his doctorate in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2014. He has served on the committees of several conferences and organizations, including co-chair of the robotics track for AAMAS 2019, and executive committee of the RoboCup Small Size League.

Congratulations, Joydeep!