Designing to Optimize User Experience
Tell me about user experience (UX) design. What is it and what is the goal? User experience design can be thought of as the design of everything that is related to a user’s — or a customer’s — interaction with a company. It includes interactions with the company’s brand, its services, and its products. It […]
Shield AI Fundamentals: Trajectory Planning
We ask very difficult missions of Nova. For example, we ask it to explore a previously unknown building while detecting potential threats and evading them, respond to our user’s requests immediately, and to provide a live video stream and create a map in real time. Completing these missions in a performant, robust manner requires Nova […]
Shield AI Fundamentals: On Mapping
The Role of Mapping in Autonomy As is evident in the name, the key component of any autonomous robotic system is its basic autonomy; its loop of perception, cognition, and action which enables a robot to determine what it should do, when it should do it, and how. In the following paragraphs, I will cover […]
What is Coordinated Exploration?
What is coordinated exploration? In the context of Shield AI, coordinated exploration corresponds to the deployment of multi-robot systems in order to explore an environment. These multi-robot systems collectively develop a structural model of that environment by moving through and navigating around it. Coordinated exploration refers to how the robots decide how to move through […]
Inside Hardware: Thermal System Design
Why do we design thermal systems? Often, when electronics are used they are not 100% efficient. Inefficiency translates to a non-trivial amount of energy released as heat. Thermal systems are often required to properly manage that heat. Why is it important? Without thermal management, eventually an engineered system won’t work anymore; it will overheat. This […]
How Do Robots Learn Through Exploration?
How does learning appear within the context of coordinated exploration? Within the context of exploration, learning emerges the more the system operates. The system improves with operation because the more that it operates, the more experience it acquires about how the actions it takes given the appearance and nature of the environment will impact the […]
Inside Hardware: Designing a Circuit Board
Why are circuit boards important? At the simplest level, circuit boards are the glue that integrates all of the higher-level system features together. Where do you start when designing a circuit board? There is a lot that goes into circuit boards — power regulation, filtering, different communications, buses, and chips — but before you get […]
How do Robots Communicate with Each Other?
A conversation with Professor Nathan Michael, Shield AI’s Chief Technology Officer. This is a continuation of our conversation about Trust and Robotic Systems. In terms of multi-robot systems, how do we think about coordination in terms of how robots communicate with each other and learn together? When we talk about multi-robot exploration and teams of […]
What is Multi-Robot Exploration?
A conversation with Professor Nathan Michael, Shield AI’s Chief Technology Officer. This is a continuation of our conversation about Trust and Robotic Systems. What do we mean by multi-robot exploration? Exploration for a single robot system in our context considers uncertainty reduction in an unknown environment performed by a single agent. It involves the system […]
How Artificial Intelligence Manifests Through Exploration
A conversation with Professor Nathan Michael, Shield AI’s Chief Technology Officer. This is a continuation of our conversation about Trust and Robotic Systems. In reference to robotic systems, what do we mean by exploration? Typically, when we talk about exploration with an autonomous robotic system for the types of scenarios that we consider, we’re talking […]
