Projects

The Autonomous Vehicle Laboratory is a research team at UC San Diego led by the Contextual Robotics Director, Dr. Henrik I. Christensen. The group’s research focus is to explore and develop robust autonomous car systems and architectures. From this, AVL aims to develop self-driving cars for mail-delivery and micro-transit applications on campus while collaborating with its network of industry experts.

The Distributed and Collaborative Intelligent Systems and Technology Collaborative Research Alliance (CRA) will create Autonomous, Resilient, Cognitive, Heterogeneous Swarms that can enable humans to participate in a wide range of missions in dynamically changing, harsh, and contested environments. These include search and rescue of hostages, information gathering after terrorist attacks or natural disasters, and humanitarian missions. Swarms of humans and robots will operate as a cohesive team with robots preventing humans from coming in harms way (Force Protection) and extending and amplifying their reach to allow one human to do the work of ten humans (Force Multiplication). Our research will create swarms that will provide on-demand services in these missions.

The Cognitive Robotics Laboratory studies design of robot systems that can perceive the world, learn from prior experience and plan missions to accomplish everyday tasks in indoor and outdoor scenes. The research engages a holistic perspective to design of robust systems that can adapt to its environment and interact with non-expert users.

The TILOS mission is to make impossible optimizations possible, at scale and in practice. Our research will pioneer learning-enabled optimizations that transform chip design, robotics, networks and other use domains that are vital to our nation’s health, prosperity and welfare. TILOS is a National Science Foundation funded National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research Institute.