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Center for Autonomy
Enabling high-impact research in autonomous system design
About the Center for Autonomy
Located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Center for Autonomy will enable high-impact research and develop new educational programs for students and professionals. The Center will play an important role in designing innovative systems that can function autonomously, or without human intervention, in a safe and reliable way.
From self-driving cars to intelligent robotic assistants to remote surgical systems, autonomous technology will revolutionize the way we live, work, and play. In order to enable this revolution, however, advancements in foundational research and workforce development must first take place to provide assured and certified-safe performance.
Application areas include:
UPCOMING SEMINAR
Meta-knowledge about observations in tractable robot planning under uncertainty
Friday, April 17, 2026
2:00pm Central Time
Talks are held virtually through Zoom
Speaker: Dylan Shell (Texas A&M)
Robots’ sensors provide information that is seldom, alas, a perfect characterization of state. This challenge has been tackled through classic techniques such as probabilistic estimation and filtering, as well as uncertainty-aware planning. Such approaches are effective when uncertainty may be appropriately modeled as noise (e.g., degradation or corruption via randomness). Instead, this talk examines a rather different species of non-ideal observability: we examine circumstances in which sensing information is sporadic, with high-quality data arriving only intermittently. The challenges then include temporal sparsity, with the robot having to act with estimates that are out-of-date. After presenting our bounding-based approach to the problem of planning for such settings, I will explain some counter-intuitive examples (e.g., more frequent information isn’t always better). A core underlying idea is that meta-knowledge (i.e., knowledge about knowledge) plays a specific role for the robot, and in this case such meta-knowledge describes when future information will arrive, but not what that information will be. I will then discuss the question of how and when to establish such knowledge, including via negotiation between cooperating parties. It will turn out that part of this involves robots planning to re-plan.