IROS 2025 Keynotes - Field Robotics: Brendan Englot

Original Description

"Keynote Title: ""Situational Awareness and Decision-Making Under Uncertainty for Marine Robots""

Speaker Biography

Brendan Englot is the Anson Wood Burchard Endowed Professor at Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, USA, where he is also the Director of the Stevens Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Brendan and his students develop perception, navigation and decision-making algorithms that enable mobile robots to achieve robust autonomy in complex physical environments. Brendan is a Senior Member of the IEEE, and a co-author of eight U.S. patents and more than 75 refereed journal and conference papers. Abstract

This talk will discuss recent work aimed at advancing the autonomy of marine robots operating in complex environments. First, to achieve the situational awareness needed for autonomous inspection and precise physical intervention, I will discuss research that aims to produce accurate, high-definition 3D maps of underwater structures using wide-aperture multi-beam imaging sonar. Second, I will discuss research intended to help marine robots make safe and efficient navigation decisions under both epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty. To address the former, sonar-equipped underwater robots use ""virtual maps"" as a tool to support accurate map-building under localization uncertainty. To address the latter, we employ distributional reinforcement learning to help lidar-equipped unmanned surface vehicles navigate congested and disturbance-filled environments. Our results include several open-source algorithm implementations and benchmarking tools.

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