Group Travel Award for 2017 Workshop on Learning Perception and Control for Autonomous Flight: Safety, Memory, and Efficiency

空中机器人，通常被称为无人机，在几个研究、教育、国防和商业应用方面有希望。一些例子包括精准农业、航空摄影、敏捷检查和监测以及包裹递送。在空中机器人开始冒险走出研究实验室、进入现实世界的大多数应用中，机器人的操作往往是半自动的。半自主操作通常假设GPS信号可用于定位，以及至少一些关于工作环境的先验信息。在未知的环境中，基于感觉的、完全自主的操作大多仍处于研究阶段。然而，赋予空中机器人完全自主性可以增强它们对国家教育、经济和国防的影响。为此，将感知、规划和控制无缝地融合到未知环境中的自主机器人飞行中是很重要的。这可以通过将机器学习工具集成到空中机器人的感知和控制中来实现。深度学习是最近出现的一种很有前途的提取自主语义的方法。学习自主飞行的感知和控制可以通过用原始传感器观测取代手工设计的地图表示，并学习适当的响应来实现。然而，这并不是一项简单的任务，仍然存在几个挑战。本研讨会重点讨论如何i)以最佳方式整合记忆和ii)为基于学习的系统提供安全保证。这两个方面对于提高空中机器人在未知环境中自主操作的能力，推动当前机器人飞行的最先进水平是必要的。除了机器人飞行领域，这个研讨会的成果与赋予能够学习的一般机器人系统的自主性相关，从而帮助使自主机器人无处不在。本研讨会的目标是解决所面临的理论和技术挑战，以便赋予基于学习的系统在未知环境中自主操作的能力。这一努力的关键一步是了解记忆增强的自主学习者如何在可证明的安全保证下运作。因此，研讨会审查了两个高度相关的问题。I)如何从理论上分析基于学习的系统的数据和结构，为安全和任务成功提供保证？Ii)长期记忆的作用是什么，尤其是循环连接或动态外部记忆能否取代全局地图信息？研讨会通过召集来自机器人规划和控制、强化学习和深度学习以及正式方法的专家来寻求这些问题的答案。研讨会还邀请在相关领域工作的投稿作者参加。这些包括但不限于将深度强化学习应用于欠驱动机器人的基于视觉的控制；学习视觉运动策略并基于神经网络推导学习的形式保证；以及开发涉及时间递归和记忆的神经网络结构。上述问题是在高速空中机器人自主导航的背景下提出的。然而，它们的范围可以推广到机器人学的其他领域，即在未知环境中学习自主操作的感知和控制是可取的；例如操纵和腿部运动。

Aerial robots, commonly referred to as drones, offer promise in several research, educational, defense and commercial applications. Some examples include precise agriculture, aerial photography, agile inspection and monitoring, and package delivery. In most of those applications that aerial robots have started venturing outside the research lab and into the real world, robot operation is often semi-autonomous. Semi-autonomous operation typically assumes availability of GPS signal for localization, and at least some prior information about the working environment. Sensory-based, fully autonomous operation in unknown environments remains mostly at the research stage. Yet, endowing full autonomy to aerial robots can enhance their impact on the nation's education, economy, and defense. To this end, it is important to seamlessly merge perception, planning, and control for autonomous robotic flight in unknown environments. This can be achieved by integrating machine learning tools into aerial robot perception and control. Deep learning has recently emerged as a promising way to extract semantic meaning for autonomy. Learning perception and control for autonomous flight can be approached by replacing hand-engineered map representations with raw sensor observations, and learning appropriate responses. However, this is not a straightforward task, and several challenges remain. This workshop critically addresses how to i) best incorporate memory and ii) derive safety guarantees for the learning-based system. These two aspects are necessary to improve the capacity of aerial robots to operate autonomously in unknown environments, and to push forward the current state-of-the-art in robotic flight. In addition to the domain of robotic flight, the outcomes of this workshop are relevant to endowing autonomy in general robotic systems that are able to learn, thus helping make autonomous robots ubiquitous.The objective of this workshop is to address the theoretical and technical challenges faced in order to endow learning-based systems with the capacity to operate autonomously in unknown environments. A critical step in this effort is to understand how memory-augmented autonomous learners can operate with provable safety guarantees. The workshop thus examines two highly-relevant questions. i) How to theoretically analyze the data and structure of learning-based systems to provide guarantees on safety and task success? ii) What is the effect of long-term memory and, in particular, can recurrent connections or dynamic external memory replace global map information? The workshop seeks answers to these questions by bringing together experts from robot planning and control, reinforcement learning and deep learning, and formal methods. The workshop also solicits participation of contributed authors working in relevant areas. These include but are not limited to applying deep reinforcement learning for vision-based control of underactuated robots; learning visuomotor policies and deriving formal guarantees for learning based on neural networks; and developing neural network architectures that involve temporal recurrence and memory. The above questions are asked here in the context of high-speed aerial robot autonomous navigation. However, their scope can be generalized to other areas of robotics that learning perception and control for autonomous operation in unknown environments is desirable; examples include manipulation and legged locomotion.