Title: Guardian Research Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract: This talk will describe research underway at Toyota Research Institute and its partner universities to create the Toyota Guardian system for increasing the safety of human driving by exploiting advanced navigation, perception, prediction, and planning capabilities that are becoming available. The objective of Guardian is to create a highly automated driving system that can act as a safety net for the human driver to help prevent an accident, with three primary aims: (1) stay on the road; (2) don't hit things; (3) don't get hit. We will discuss some of the research challenges and opportunities for realizing such a system, spanning a wide range of topics in computer vision, machine learning, and mobile robotics.

Bio: Dr. John J. Leonard is Samuel C. Collins Professor in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering and a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His research addresses the problems of navigation and mapping for autonomous mobile robots and underwater vehicles. He holds the degrees of B.S.E.E. in Electrical Engineering and Science from the University of Pennsylvania (1987) and D.Phil. in Engineering Science from the University of Oxford (1994). He was team leader for MIT's DARPA Urban Challenge team, which was one of eleven teams to qualify for the Urban Challenge final event and one of six teams to complete the race. He is the recipient of an NSF Career Award (1998) and the King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Transactions on Robotics Paper Award (2006). He is an IEEE Fellow (2014). Professor Leonard has recently been on partial leave from MIT serving as Vice President of Automated Driving Research at the Toyota Research Institute (TRI).