AASS Seminar - Robotic Sailing: A Sea full of Challenges for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics

The research centre AASS arranges a seminar with Diedrich Wolter, University of Bamberg.

Link to Zoom

Abstract

Robotic sailing features several interesting research questions and serious applications: Robotic platforms constitute mobile platforms for marine sensor networks, with applications such as environmental surveillance, oceanographic research, or fish farming. Sailing technology already helps reducing fossil fuel consumption in merchant shipping, with pioneers striving for a rebirth of (robotic) merchant sailing vessels. In this talk I discuss challenges of robotic sailing, which are well-aligned with current AI research:

dependability of AI systems, coping with a lack of training data, uncertainty, and (non-)strategic coalition formulation of agents. I motivate further research in an area that, despite its serious applications and clear-cut research questions, has not gained sufficient attention by the research community. I argue that robotic sailing is a microcosm for several challenging problems in AI and robotics, which makes the area ideally suited for research and education.

Bio

Diedrich Wolter is professor for smart environments at the university of Bamberg, Germany, working at connecting Artificial Intelligence to technical systems. His research focuses on knowledge representation and reasoning, in particular qualitative reasoning about physical systems and spatial reasoning. These techniques are used in the BamBirds agent for physical action planning under uncertainty, Bamberg's entry to the international AI competition "AI Birds" that won the championship twice. Diedrich Wolter is an active member of the Artificial Intelligence community (serving for conferences such as IJCAI, ECAI, AAAI) who enjoys scientific competitions.