Vladlen Koltun — The Power of Simulation and Abstraction

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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