Speaker | Prof. Silvère Bonnabel
Mines Paris PSL, Paris Sciences et Lettres Research University, France
Date｜Time Feb 26 (Thursday), 2026｜17:00
Zoom https://snu-ac-kr.zoom.us/my/jingyu.lee
Abstract
Perception and localization are fundamental to autonomous systems, yet they rely on sensor data that are noisy, partial, and in a nonlinear setting are strongly influenced by the followed trajectory. In practice, how a system moves determines how well it can estimate its state: some trajectories are weakly informative, while others greatly improve accuracy. This observation motivates active perception or active sensing, where sensing and motion are designed jointly rather than separately.
In this talk, I will present an information-aware planning framework that embeds estimation uncertainty directly into trajectory optimization. Using an Extended Kalman Filter, uncertainty is propagated along candidate trajectories and incorporated into the control cost, encouraging motions that actively improve perception. To keep the resulting problems tractable, we derive analytical gradients of the filter covariance through backpropagation (along candidate trajectories), enabling efficient and fast optimization.
This approach provides a unified methodology that allows for various applications that include online sensor calibration, quadrotor collision avoidance, and measurement selection (for data compression or sensing energy constraints), illustrating how autonomous systems can plan to perceive more effectively in order to act more safely.
Biography
Silvère Bonnabel is a professor at Mines Paris PSL, Paris Sciences et Lettres Research University. His research lies in the intersection of control theory, robotics, and learning. He received his doctoral degree in Mathematics and Control from Mines Paris in 2007. He was an Invited Fellow at the University of Cambridge in 2017, and at INRIA Paris in 2022. Dr. Bonnabel received various awards that include the European Control Award in 2021, and the Prix Espoir IMT-Académie des sciences in 2022. He currently serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Control Systems.
