Beyond Hand Labeling: Simulation and Self-Supervision for Self-Driving Cars (Matt Johnson, University of Michigan)

Self-driving cars now deliver vast amounts of sensor data from large unstructured environments. In attempting to process and interpret this data there are many unique challenges in bridging the gap between prerecorded data sets and the field. This talk will present recent work addressing the application of deep learning techniques to robotic perception. We focus on solutions to several pervasive problems when attempting to deploy such techniques on fielded robotic systems. The themes of the talk revolve around alternatives to gathering and curating data sets for training. Are there ways of avoiding the labor-intensive human labeling required for supervised learning? These questions give rise to several lines of research based around self-supervision, adversarial learning, and simulation. We will show how these approaches applied to self-driving car problems have great potential to change the way we train, test, and validate machine learning-based systems.

Bio: Matthew Johnson-Roberson is Assistant Professor of Engineering in the Department of Naval Architecture & Marine Engineering and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. He received a PhD from the University of Sydney in 2010. He has held prior postdoctoral appointments with the Centre for Autonomous Systems - CAS at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and the Australian Centre for Field Robotics at the University of Sydney. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award (2015). He has worked in robotic perception since the first DARPA grand challenge and his group focuses on enabling robots to better see and understand their environment.