John J. Leonard

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The Reality & Future of Automated Driving - Professor John Leonard, MIT

Published on May 1, 2019

What are the different levels & approaches of automated driving What have been the key breakthroughs along the way to where we are now? What are the most promising research opportunities for the industry?

Professor John Leonard, one of MIT’s most prominent researchers in the field, will give a panoramic perspective of some of the challenges and opportunities in self-driving vehicles and advanced automotive safety by reviewing the history of AV research & industry rollout and discussing potential timelines for future deployment.

He will discuss the history of self-driving, with a focus on the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, and some of the major challenges, recent progress and future research opportunities in self-driving, including building and maintaining high-resolution maps and developing advanced perception, prediction, and human interaction systems.

He will then review the different approaches to automated driving, including SAE Level 2 and SAE Level 4 systems, as well as the Toyota Guardian approach, which flips the conventional mindset from having the human guard the AI (as in SAE Level 2 systems) to instead using AI to guard the human driver.

Finally, he will discuss research opportunities in mapping, localization, perception, prediction, and planning and control to realize improved safety through advanced automation in the future.

Dr. John J. Leonard is the Samuel C. Collins Professor in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering and a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

His research addresses the problems of navigation and mapping for autonomous mobile robots and underwater vehicles. Dr. Leonard holds the degrees of BSEE in Electrical Engineering and Science from the University of Pennsylvania (1987) and a PhD in Engineering Science from the University of Oxford (1994).

He is the recipient of an NSF Career Award (1998) and the King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Transactions on Robotics Paper Award (2006). He is an IEEE Fellow (2014). Since 2016, Professor Leonard has also worked at Toyota Research Institute, where he is part of a team that is creating the Toyota Guardian automated driving system.