Dr. Guoquan (Paul) Huang
Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering (ME) and Computer and Information Sciences (CIS), University of Delaware
Time: 12:30 pm – 1:30 pm
Date: Friday, September 20
Location: BC 220
Abstract: As cameras and IMUs are becoming ubiquitous, visual-inertial systems for spatial perception, in analogy to biological visual-vestibular neural systems, hold great potential in a wide range of applications from extended reality (XR) to autonomous robots. While visual-inertial navigation systems (VINS), alongside with SLAM, have witnessed tremendous progress in the past decade, yet certain critical aspects in the design of visual-inertial systems remain poorly explored, hindering the widespread deployment of these systems in practice. In this talk, I will present some recent research efforts of my group on advancing the state of the art of visual-inertial sensing, navigation and perception, including consistent and efficient 3D motion tracking and scene understanding. Many of the codebases have been open sourced to promote visual-inertial systems, broadly benefiting the community.
Bio: Guoquan (Paul) Huang is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering (ME) and Computer and Information Sciences (CIS) at the University of Delaware (UD), where he is leading the Robot Perception and Navigation Group (RPNG). He is also a Principal Scientist at Meituan. He was a Postdoctoral Associate (2012-2014) at MIT CSAIL (Marine Robotics) after receiving his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota. From 2003 to 2005, and was a Research Assistant (Electrical Engineering) at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research interests focus on state estimation and spatial computing for robotics and XR, including optimal sensing, calibration, localization, mapping, tracking, perception, navigation and locomotion of autonomous robots and mobile devices. He has served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), and IET Cyber-Systems and Robotics (CSR), as well as the robotics flagship conferences (ICRA and IROS). Dr. Huang has received many honors and awards, including the 2015 UD Research Award (UDRF), 2015/2023 NASA DE Space Research Seed Award, 2016 NSF Research Initiation Award, 2018 Google Daydream Faculty Research Award, 2019 Google AR/VR Faculty Research Award, 2020 ARL SARA Award, 2022 Google AI Faculty Research Award, 2023 Meta Reality Labs Faculty Research Award. He was recognized among the AI 2000 Scholars (Top 100 in robotics) and World Top 2% Scientists. He was also the recipient of the ICRA 2022 Best Paper Award (Navigation), 2022 Best Paper Award of GNC Journal, and the Finalists of the ICRA 2024 Best Paper Award (Robot Vision), RSS 2023 Best Student Paper Award, ICRA 2021 Best Paper Award (Robot Vision), and RSS 2009 Best Paper Award.