Gian Luca Mariottini
Principal Member at Draper Laboratories
Cambridge, MA, USA
Lecture title: “Assistive Autonomy”.
Abstract: The talk will highlight recent research in the areas of assistive autonomous systems, including the use of surgical robots to aid surgeons to better treat cancer, to assisting human operators in dangerous environments by using autonomous drones. This talk will consist of both academic- and Government-funded research that Dr. Mariottini has been condicted both as an Assistant Professor (University of Texas at Arlington) as well as a Principal Investigator (Draper Labs, Cambridge Massachusetts). In particular, the talk will focus on the importance of perception for autonomy, and describe (among others) the recent results from the DARPA Fast Lightweight Autonomy program with drones flying at up to 20 m/s in a GPS-denied environment only using a monocular camera. Dr. Mariottini will also present his work on bio-inspired navigation for micro- drones in GPS-denied environments, and for creating light-weight semantic representations of the surrounding world.
Short Biography
Dr. Mariottini has more than 12 years of research and development experience in intelligent autonomous systems and has published more than 50 journal and conference papers in the areas of robotic perception, localization, and control. His research focuses in the areas of computer vision, robot control and machine learning with applications to unmanned aerial and ground robots, swarming, and assistive technology for medical applications.
Dr. Mariottini is currently a Principal Member at Draper Laboratories (Cambridge, MA, USA) when he joined in early 2016. From 2010 to 2016 he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington (Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering) where he created the ASTRA Robotics and Vision Lab. Dr. Mariottini was the organizer of the International Workshop of Surgical Vision, the Robotics in Assistive Environment Workshop, the Computer-Assisted Robotics and Endoscopy workshop. He has been working in collaboration with many multi-disciplinary collaborators (UT Southwestern Medical Center, Vanderbilt University, and UNT Health Science Center, Univ. Rome La Sapienza, Univ. Siena, Leeds Univ. etc.), and received support from government agencies (NSF, DARPA, DoE) as well as by industry partners.
Dr. Mariottini received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Siena, Italy, in 2006 and held PostDoc positions with Kostas Daniilidis (GRASP Lab, UPENN), Frank Dellaert (GeorgiaTech), and Stergios Roumeliotis (University of Minnesota).
