Thread by @UCSDJacobs

We are hosting a workshop organized by @theNAEng on autonomy today, with a wide range of speakers from academia and industry. You can join us here: ucsd.zoom.us/j/96089910170
We will also be tweeting updates throughout the day
#autonomy #AV #robotics

Dean Al Pisano: This is an opportunity for us to ask where we are in this field and how we make sure that this technology is being leveraged to ensure we advance important work.

.@PennEngineers Dean @vijay_r_kumar in his opening remarks: one key question is how to get humans to interact with machines

Fascinating talk from @ETH_en Prof @EmilioFrazzoli: There is a no clear specification of what safety means. Rules of the road are no complete, and are not technically precise, and at times they are contradictory and open to interpretation.

Frazzoli: Sometimes you need to “break to law” to ensure safety.
There are not too many rules. Rather it’s hard to code the behaviors and hard to learn, because many, many edge cases.
It is however easy to assess what good behaviors are.

Frazzoli: While all laws are equal, some laws are more equal than others. We need to find the preferable behaviors.
This is an ongoing issue and we need to engage stakeholders and keep talking and evaluating.

Frazzoli: We need to internalize a reasonable level of care and we need to provide a tangible economic and societal benefit.

Thank you @ETH_en Prof @EmilioFrazzoli for an interesting and engaging keynote!

.@BrianYutko @Boeing points out sustainability and future mobility are connected. It's going to be quite a while until electric aviation becomes mainstream. But aircraft of the future will be autonomous. So it makes sense to investigate how to power them with electricity.

.@USNavyResearch director @LCSelby: We are at a crucial moment in history. By the end of this century, they way we transport and fly is going to look very different. Engineering and research need to drive this transition.

.@USNavyResearch is organizing a public event to advanced unmanned technologies: hackthemachine.ai

.@DARPA program manager @timothyhchung: we are trying to both prevent and create technological surprises. He managed the agency's Subterranean Challenge: subtchallenge.com

Our CTO forum is happening at 11:30 a.m. today

Drew Bagnell, chief scientist for @aurora_inno: Autonomy is here today but it is not evenly distributed.

Brett Piekarski, chief scientist @ArmyResearchLab: our central challenge is how to scale technology to enable teams of heterogenous autonomous agents to collective sense, infer, reason, plan and execute in complex environments and in the face of a peer adversary.

.@Qualcomm self-driving unit chief engineer @aksadek: Scalability is always top of mind.

Amazon Robotics chief technologist @spaceguytye: We transformed how we do fulfillment and material handling with robotics

Tye Brady call to action: build more collaborative
systems, for robots that are physically closer to us in our human environment
Build robots that create a learning environment to better understand capability and intent1/2

Build intuitive human/robot interfaces
Build robots that know how to move fast or slow
Use the cloud better 2/2

.@rodneyabrooks: autonomy is an illusion because people will always be involved, It’s an interplay, an interaction and we should think about how these interactions happen.

Brooks: For a lot of the autonomy that we’ve been talking about today, we need to build infrastructure so they can be broadly deployed.
Autonomy is not just a drop-in element, it needs to include the whole system.

David Werner, director of human systems integration group for @GenralAtomics: autonomy is not new to aviation. Autopilot systems have been around for a long, long time. We’re always thinking about what we can deploy now, or soon.

For our next steps panel, Marc Steinberg, head of @USNavyResearch Science of Autonomy program: "My general take on autonomy, is that we have a long way to go, but I’m optimistic because I see a lot of progress being made."

Brian Sadler, senior scientist for intelligent systems @ArmyResearchLab: A critical part of national strategy is infrastructure to support autonomous systems and research. The training and STEM is also critical.
We’re going towards a symbiosis autonomy-human-information.

Jono Anderson, principal @KPMG: Autonomy can take many forms. Autonomy protects us from ourselves and from the machine. Autonomy really means many technologies.

Closing remarks from @UCSanDiego Dean Pisano: None of us will succeed unless we find a way to make our work in autonomy inter-operable.
He emphasized the need for academia and industry to work hand in hand.

.@hiskov, director of the @UCSanDiego Contextual Robotics Institute: the main issue is to build an ecosystem for autonomy.

Thank you to panel moderators @jwaydo, CTO of @cavnue and @PennEngineers Dean @vijay_r_kumar!