Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI
The power of simulation and abstraction with Intel's Vladlen Koltun
From legged locomotion to autonomous driving, Vladlen explains how simulation and abstraction help us understand embodied intelligence.
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Vladlen Koltun is the Chief Scientist for Intelligent Systems at Intel, where he leads an international lab of researchers working in machine learning, robotics, computer vision, computational science, and related areas.
Connect with Vladlen:
Personal website: http://vladlen.info/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladlenkoltun/
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0:00 Sneak peek and intro
1:20 "Intelligent Systems" vs "AI"
3:02 Legged locomotion
9:26 The power of simulation
14:32 Privileged learning
18:19 Drone acrobatics
20:19 Using abstraction to transfer simulations to reality
25:35 Sample Factory for reinforcement learning
34:30 What inspired CARLA and what keeps it going
41:43 The challenges of and for robotics
Links Discussed
Learning quadrupedal locomotion over challenging terrain (Lee et al., 2020): https://robotics.sciencemag.org/content/5/47/eabc5986.abstract
Deep Drone Acrobatics (Kaufmann et al., 2020): https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.05768
Sample Factory: Egocentric 3D Control from Pixels at 100000 FPS with Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning (Petrenko et al., 2020): https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.11751
CARLA: https://carla.org/
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