Seminar on Bats, Robots, AI, and the Quest for Autonomy in Natural Environments

27 Nov 2024 10.30 AM - 11.30 AM MAE Meeting Room D (Blk N3.2-02-59) Current Students, Public

Prof Rolf Mueller

Lynn Professor of Mechanical Engineering

Director BIST Center

Virginia Tech

This seminar will be chaired by A/P Fan Zheng, David.

Seminar Abstract

Accomplishing useful tasks in complex natural environments poses the highest-level challenge for autonomous systems. Among other difficulties, the control aspect of this problem continues to elude state-of-the-art AI systems. Bat species that rely on a combination of biosonar sensing and flapping flight to navigate dense vegetation are exceptional model systems for these abilities since they routinely navigate complex habitats in a dexterous, reliable, and highly parsimonious fashion where all sensory information about the environment is conveyed by one-dimensional echo trains received at the two ears. Applying a combination of biomimetic robotics and deep-learning data analysis can shed light on how bats encode and extract the sensory information that they need to navigate in dense vegetation and explain capabilities such as location identification and passageway finding. The abilities of bats indicate the feasibility of alternative AI paradigms for dealing with complex environments that are not based on concepts from vision, but can derive all necessary sensory information from statistical invariants in signals that have to be regarded as random for lack of knowledge and can hence not support template-matching based approaches.

    Speaker's Biography 

    Prof. Müller is Lynn Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Virginia Tech, USA. He received his bachelor's degree, master’s degree, and Ph.D. from the University of Tübingen. As a member of the Virginia Tech community since 2008, Müller's research has generated new principles for sensing in complex natural environments by taking inspiration from bats. His research has resulted in new fundamental insights into biological sensing, demonstrating the ability of bats to carry out a complex nonlinear transformation of the incoming echoes through Doppler shifts created by fast motions of their own ears. There was no parallel to this phenomenon in sensory physiology, and his findings were published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2019.Using these insights, Müller’s team combined a biomimetic dynamic sound receiver with deep-learning analysis of the complex Doppler shift patterns to demonstrate, for the first time, a system that could localize the source of a single-frequency sound with just a single receiver.

    Müller’s achievements are also reflected in research grants totaling $11.8 million, including funding from the Office of Naval Research’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiatives (ONR MURI) program and the National Science Foundation’s International Research Experiences for Students program.

    He has led Virginia Tech’s portion of an ongoing ONR MURI that works with partners at Brown University, Johns Hopkins University, and Texas A&M University. His work on biomimetic robotic sonar has been supported continuously by the Naval Engineering Education Center since 2014. Additional funding and infrastructure support has come from the National Science Foundation, the Army Research Office, NASA, IBM, and Microsoft.

    Müller has mentored 43 Ph.D. and master’s degree students and is currently supervising 10 graduate students. He has co-authored 125 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers and five book chapters and has made more than 200 presentations, including many invited and keynote talks. He has received prestigious honors such as a Fulbright award from the U.S. Department of State in 2022, the Virginia Tech Alumni Award for Excellence in International Research in 2016, and a Taishan Endowed Professorship from Shandong University in 2009. He has been a fellow of the Acoustical Society of America since 2019.

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