Robotic System Performance: From Academia to Industry & From Hardware to Software

Robotics is an exciting computing platform with a wide variety of performance challenges that span multiple disciplines.   How fast can robot decide what to do next, a problem called task planning?  Given a decision, how fast can the robot figure out how to implement it, a problem called motion planning?  Given a motion plan, how fast can the robot perform the desired motions?  And, for all of these challenges, how fast is fast enough?  The talk will discuss the issues involved in robotic system performance, with an emphasis on motion planning.  The talk will cover the journey from academic research at Duke University to an industrial product at Realtime Robotics and, in doing so, it will cover the journey from special-purpose hardware acceleration to pure software.   The speaker promises that there will be more robot videos than performance graphs.

Daniel J. Sorin

Professor, Duke University on September 21, 2023 at 4:00 PM in MRC 454

Daniel J. Sorin is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and of Computer Science at Duke University. He is also a Founder and Chief Architect of Realtime Robotics. His research interests are in computer architecture, with a focus on fault tolerance, verification, and memory system design. He is the author of "Fault Tolerant Computer Architecture" and a co-author of "A Primer on Memory Consistency and Cache Coherence." He received a PhD and MS in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Wisconsin,
and he received a BSE in electrical engineering from Duke University.

This lecture series features exciting and dynamic visiting and virtual speakers from across the range of ECE disciplines. Take some time every Friday morning to be inspired by these great scientists and engineers before heading into the weekend!