Robotics Institute Seminar: Leslie Kaelbling, “The Role of Rationality in Modern Robotics”

This seminar is co-hosted with the Department of Computer Science

Schwartz Reisman Innovation Campus, West Winter Garden (10th Floor)

The classical approach to AI designed systems that were rational at run-time: they had explicit representations of beliefs, goals, and plans and ran inference algorithms, online, to select actions. The rational approach was criticized (by the behaviorists) and modified (by the probabilists) but persisted in some form. More recently, relatively unstructured data-driven end-to-end approaches have demonstrated great success in a wide variety of domains, and began to seem like a plausible route to general-purpose intelligent robots. However, most recently, we have begun to see the limits of pure behavior learning and many practitioners are re-integrating forms of search and explicit reasoning into their approaches.

Professor Kaelbling will revisit the rational-agent approach to the design of intelligent robots, from the perspectives of engineering effort, computational efficiency, cognitive modeling and understandability. They will present some current research focused on understanding the roles of learning in runtime-rational agents with the ultimate aim of constructing general-purpose human-level intelligent robots.