PhD Defense: 'Motion Planning under Uncertainty for Autonomous Navigation of Mobile Robots and UAVs'

This thesis presents a reliable and efficient motion planning approach based on state lattices for the autonomous navigation of mobile robots and UAVs. The proposal retrieves optimal paths in terms of safety and traversal time, and deals with the kinematic constraints and the motion and sensing uncertainty at planning time.

The efficiency is improved by a novel graduated fidelity state lattice which adapts to the obstacles in the map and the maneuverability of the robot, and by a new multi-resolution heuristic which reduces the computational complexity. The motion planner also includes a novel method to reliably estimate the probability of collision of the paths considering the uncertainty in heading and the robot dimensions.

Supervisors: Alberto Bugarín Diz and Manuel Mucientes Molina

(Warning: read carefully the following instructions to attend this virtual thesis):

Those interested in attending the defense of this doctoral thesis as a public, should send a request to the email edius@usc.es**, indicating in the subject line "Asistencia tesis de [PhD candidate NAME]", at least twenty-four hours before the PhD defense is carried out. The following information must be included:

1. Name and last name.
2. Email address from which you want to connect.
3. PhD degree (optional): since the questions to the doctoral student can only be asked by PhDs, please, if you are planning to make some questions you must send a copy of your degree.

Applicants will receive in the email provided an invitation to join the Microsoft TEAMS group created to carry out the defense. If you do not have this application installed, you will find in this email the link to download it.