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Reliable Autonomous Systems Lab (RASL)
Head: Reid Simmons

Mailing address:
Carnegie Mellon University
Robotics Institute
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Lab Location: NSH A513
Lab Phone: (412) 268 5924

For more information, see this lab's homepage.

This page last updated - January 1999.

Lab Description

We are developing reliable, highly autonomous systems (especially mobile robots) that operate in rich, uncertain environments. The goal is to create intelligent systems that can operate autonomously for long periods of time in unstructured, natural environments. This necessitates robots that can plan, effectively reason about uncertainty, diagnose and recover from unanticipated errors, and reason about their limitations. In particular, we are interested in architectures for autonomy that combine deliberative and reactive behavior, reliable execution monitoring and error recovery, multi-robot coordination, probabilistic and symbolic planning, formal verification of autonomous systems, and human-robot social interaction.

Personnel [Past members]

	Name	Title	Email Address
	David Apfelbaum	Senior Research Programmer, CS	da0g@cs.cmu.edu
	Greg Armstrong	Senior Research Technician, CS	roboman@andrew.cmu.edu
	Allison Bruce	PhD Student, RI	abruce@andrew.cmu.edu
	Rachel Gockley	PhD Student, RI	rgockley@andrew.cmu.edu
	Marek Piotr Michalowski	PhD Student, RI	n/a
	Brennan Peter Sellner	PhD Student, RI	bsellner@andrew.cmu.edu
	Reid Simmons	Research Prof/Assoc Dir Educ/PhD Chair	reids@cs.cmu.edu
	Christopher Urmson	Dir of Tech for Urban Grand Challenge	curmson@ri.cmu.edu
	Hakan Younes	PhD Student, CS	lorens@cs.cmu.edu

Current Projects [Past Projects]

Grace - The Grace project is a collaboration among several schools and research labs to design a robot capable of fully performing the AAAI Grand Challenge.	Roboceptionist - In collaboration with the Drama Department, we are developing technology for long-term social interaction.
Social Robots - We are developing robots with personality.	Xavier - Perceptual, reasoning and learning abilities in autonomous mobile robots

Recent publications [View all 66 publications]

• Socially Distributed Perception: GRACE plays Social Tag at AAAI 2005
  M.P. Michalowski, S. Sabanovic, C.F. DiSalvo, D. Busquets Font, L.M. Hiatt, N. Melchior, and R. Simmons
  Autonomous Robots, Vol. 22, No. 4, May, 2007, pp. 385-397. [Abstract]

• Making Friends: Building Social Robots through Interdisciplinary Collaboration
  S. Sabanovic, M.P. Michalowski, and L.R. Caporael
  Multidisciplinary Collaboration for Socially Assistive Robotics: Papers from the 2007 AAAI Spring Symposium, Technical Report SS-07-07, AAAI, March, 2007, pp. 71-77. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [1236 KB] copyrighted

• Natural Person-Following Behavior for Social Robots
  R. Gockley, J. Forlizzi, and R. Simmons
  Proceedings of Human-Robot Interaction, March, 2007, pp. 17-24. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [378 KB] copyrighted

• Modeling Affect in Socially Interactive Robots
  R. Gockley, R. Simmons, and J. Forlizzi
  Proceedings of the 15th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN06), September, 2006, pp. 558-563. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [289 KB] copyrighted

• A Latent Cause Model of Classical Conditioning
  A. Courville
  doctoral dissertation, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, June, 2006. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [26368 KB] copyrighted

• A spatial model of engagement for a social robot
  M.P. Michalowski, S. Sabanovic, and R. Simmons
  Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Advanced Motion Control (AMC 2006), IEEE, March, 2006, pp. 762 - 767. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [198 KB] copyrighted

• Interactions with a Moody Robot
  R. Gockley, J. Forlizzi, and R. Simmons
  Proceedings of Human-Robot Interaction, Salt Lake City, Utah, March, 2006, pp. 186-193. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [458 KB] copyrighted

• Multimodal person tracking and attention classification
  M.P. Michalowski and R. Simmons
  Proceedings of the 1st Annual Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2006), ACM, March, 2006, pp. 347-348. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [133 KB] copyrighted

• Robots in the wild: observing human-robot social interaction outside the lab
  S. Sabanovic, M.P. Michalowski, and R. Simmons
  Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Advanced Motion Control (AMC 2006), IEEE, March, 2006, pp. 596 - 601. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [155 KB] copyrighted

• Socially Distributed Perception
  M.P. Michalowski, C.F. DiSalvo, S. Sabanovic, D. Busquets Font, L.M. Hiatt, N. Melchior, and R. Simmons
  Proceedings of the 1st Annual Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2006), ACM, March, 2006, pp. 349-350. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [136 KB] copyrighted