Monte Carlo methods, or Monte Carlo experiments, are a broad class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results. The underlying concept is to use randomness to solve problems that might be deterministic in principle. They are often used in physical and mathematical problems and are most useful when it is difficult or impossible to use other approaches. Monte Carlo methods are mainly used in three problem classes: optimization, numerical integration, and generating draws from a probability distribution.
The School of Computer Science (SCS) at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US is a school for computer science established in 1988. It has been consistently ranked among the top computer science programs over the decades. As of 2022 U.S. News & World Report ranks the graduate program as tied for second with Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley. It is ranked second in the United States on Computer Science Open Rankings, which combines scores from multiple independent rankings.
Robotic mapping is a discipline related to computer vision and cartography. The goal for an autonomous robot is to be able to construct a map or floor plan and to localize itself and its recharging bases or beacons in it. Robotic mapping is that branch which deals with the study and application of ability to localize itself in a map / plan and sometimes to construct the map or floor plan by the autonomous robot.
Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is the computational problem of constructing or updating a map of an unknown environment while simultaneously keeping track of an agent's location within it. While this initially appears to be a chicken or the egg problem, there are several algorithms known to solve it in, at least approximately, tractable time for certain environments. Popular approximate solution methods include the particle filter, extended Kalman filter, covariance intersection, and GraphSLAM. SLAM algorithms are based on concepts in computational geometry and computer vision, and are used in robot navigation, robotic mapping and odometry for virtual reality or augmented reality.
Shafrira Goldwasser is an Israeli-American computer scientist and winner of the Turing Award in 2012. She is the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; a professor of mathematical sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel; the director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California, Berkeley; and co-founder and chief scientist of Duality Technologies.
The condensation algorithm is a computer vision algorithm. The principal application is to detect and track the contour of objects moving in a cluttered environment. Object tracking is one of the more basic and difficult aspects of computer vision and is generally a prerequisite to object recognition. Being able to identify which pixels in an image make up the contour of an object is a non-trivial problem. Condensation is a probabilistic algorithm that attempts to solve this problem.
The Denning Mobile Robot Company of Boston was the first company to offer ready-made autonomous robots that were subsequently purchased primarily by researchers. Grinnell More's Real World Interface, Inc. (RWI) and James Slater's Nomadic Technologies (US), along with Francesco Mondada's K-Team (Switzerland), were other pioneering companies in this field, addressing the need for ready-made robots for use by robotics researchers. RWI created the B-21, Nomadic the XR4000, whilst the tiny Khepera mobile robot emerged from the stables of the Swiss K-Team. However, the high price of these machines meant that only a few graduate students and military researchers could afford them. Eventually, the low-cost Pioneer robot was introduced in 1995, a project that expanded research in mobile robotics due to the affordable price.
Sebastian Thrun is a German-American entrepreneur, educator, and computer scientist. He is CEO of Kitty Hawk Corporation, and chairman and co-founder of Udacity. Before that, he was a Google VP and Fellow, a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, and before that at Carnegie Mellon University. At Google, he founded Google X and Google's self-driving car team. He is also an adjunct professor at Stanford University and at Georgia Tech.
Monte Carlo localization (MCL), also known as particle filter localization, is an algorithm for robots to localize using a particle filter. Given a map of the environment, the algorithm estimates the position and orientation of a robot as it moves and senses the environment. The algorithm uses a particle filter to represent the distribution of likely states, with each particle representing a possible state, i.e., a hypothesis of where the robot is. The algorithm typically starts with a uniform random distribution of particles over the configuration space, meaning the robot has no information about where it is and assumes it is equally likely to be at any point in space. Whenever the robot moves, it shifts the particles to predict its new state after the movement. Whenever the robot senses something, the particles are resampled based on recursive Bayesian estimation, i.e., how well the actual sensed data correlate with the predicted state. Ultimately, the particles should converge towards the actual position of the robot.
Robotics is the branch of technology that deals with the design, construction, operation, structural disposition, manufacture and application of robots. Robotics is related to the sciences of electronics, engineering, mechanics, and software. The word "robot" was introduced to the public by Czech writer Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R., published in 1920. The term "robotics" was coined by Isaac Asimov in his 1941 science fiction short-story "Liar!"
Takeo Kanade is a Japanese computer scientist and one of the world's foremost researchers in computer vision. He is U.A. and Helen Whitaker Professor at Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science. He has approximately 300 peer-reviewed academic publications and holds around 20 patents.
Wolfram Burgard is a German roboticist. He is a full professor at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg where he heads the Laboratory for Autonomous Intelligent Systems. He is known for his substantial contributions to the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) problem as well as diverse other contributions to robotics.
The Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines (IRIM@GT) is an interdisciplinary research unit at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The center was launched May, 2006, and consists of researchers from the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing, College of Engineering, and Georgia Tech Research Institute. IRIM@GT currently offers a Ph.D. program in robotics, the first truly multi-disciplinary program in the country after the one of Carnegie Mellon University.
Dieter Fox is a German-American roboticist and a Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, Seattle. He received his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Bonn in 1998. He is most notable for his contributions to several fields including robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and ubiquitous computing. Together with Wolfram Burgard and Sebastian Thrun he is a co-author of the book Probabilistic Robotics.
Seth A. Hutchinson is an American electrical and computer engineer. He is the Executive Director of the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he is also Professor and KUKA Chair for Robotics in the School of Interactive Computing. His research in robotics spans the areas of planning, sensing, and control. He has published widely on these topics, and is coauthor of the books "Robot Modeling and Control," published by Wiley, Principles of Robot Motion - Theory, Algorithms, and Implementations, with Howie Choset, Kevin M. Lynch, George Kantor, Wolfram Burgard, Lydia E. Kavraki and Sebastian Thrun.
Heung-Yeung "Harry" Shum is a Chinese computer scientist. He was a doctoral student of Raj Reddy. He was the Executive Vice President of Artificial Intelligence & Research at Microsoft. He is known for his research on computer vision and computer graphics, and for the development of the search engine Bing.
Sven Koenig is a full professor in computer science at the University of Southern California. He received an M.S. degree in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1991 and a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1997, advised by Reid Simmons.
Andrew Yan-Tak Ng is a British-American computer scientist and technology entrepreneur focusing on machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Ng was a cofounder and head of Google Brain and was the former Chief Scientist at Baidu, building the company's Artificial Intelligence Group into a team of several thousand people.
Information engineering is the engineering discipline that deals with the generation, distribution, analysis, and use of information, data, and knowledge in systems. The field first became identifiable in the early 21st century.
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