Sebastian Thrun is a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford, and director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He was the leader of Stanford’s team which won the $2 million first prize in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, which was a race of driver-less robotic cars across the desert, and also leads Stanford’s entry into the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge.
One of the ingredients in the Stanford team’s win was their use of “probabilistic robotics,” which is an approach based on the recognition that all sensor readings and models of the world are inherently subject to uncertainty and noise. Thrun, together with Wolfram Burgard and Dieter Fox have written the definitive text on probabilistic robotics, which will be a standard for years to come. If you are seriously interested in robotics, you should read this book. (The introductory first chapter, which clearly explains the basic ideas of probabilistic robotics is available as a download here.)
The Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) hosts the superb “Talking Robots” web-site, which consists of a series of podcast interviews with leading robotics researchers. I noticed that the latest interview is with Thrun, and liked it quite a bit; it is well worth downloading to your iPod or computer.
You can watch Thrun speaking about the DARPA Grand Challenge at this Google TechTalk.
Tags: artificial intelligence, DARPA Grand Challenge, probabilistic robotics, Robotics, Sebastian Thrun
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