Autonomous Systems and Robotics Group

July 1, 2020 | Sebastian Scherer and Ashish Kapoor

The ability to see and navigate is a critical operational requirement for robots and autonomous systems. For example, consider autonomous rescue robots that are required to maneuver and navigate in challenging physical environments that humans cannot safely access. Similarly, building AI…

March 17, 2020 | Rogerio Bonatti, Ratnesh Madaan, Vibhav Vineet, Sebastian Scherer, and Ashish Kapoor

Humans subconsciously use perception-action loops to do just about everything, from walking down a crowded sidewalk to scoring a goal in a community soccer league. Perception-action loops—using sensory input to decide on appropriate action in a continuous real time loop…

December 5, 2019 | Ratnesh Madaan and Ashish Kapoor

Drone racing has transformed from a niche activity sparked by enthusiastic hobbyists to an internationally televised sport. In parallel, computer vision and machine learning are making rapid progress, along with advances in agile trajectory planning, control, and state estimation for…

November 27, 2019

There’s a lot of excitement around self-driving cars, delivery drones, and other intelligent, autonomous systems, but before they can be deployed at scale, they need to be both reliable and safe. That’s why Gurdeep Pall, CVP of Business AI at…

September 16, 2019 | Ashish Kapoor

With inputs from: Elizabeth Bondi (Harvard University), Bob DeBortoli (Oregon State University), Balinder Malhi (Microsoft) and Jim Piavis (Microsoft) Autonomous systems have the potential to improve safety for people in dangerous jobs, particularly first responders. However, deploying these systems is…

April 30, 2019 | Daniel McDuff and Ashish Kapoor

Recent successes in machine intelligence hinge on core computation ability to efficiently search through billions of possibilities in order to make decisions. Sequences of decisions, if successful, often suggest that perhaps computation is catching up to–or even surpassing–human intelligence. Human…

April 8, 2019 | Ashish Kapoor

Autonomous Systems have attracted a lot of attention as they promise to improve efficiency, reduce cost and most importantly take on tasks that are too dangerous for humans. However, building a real-world autonomous system that would operate safely at scale…

November 14, 2018 | Ashish Kapoor and Shital Shah

At Microsoft, we have a vision and passion to bring artificial intelligence solutions to real-world systems using the power of simulation. We continually strive to accelerate AI advances with the use of realistic simulators, tools, and environments. Today we are…

November 13, 2017 | Ashish Kapoor and Shital Shah

Earlier this year, we open-sourced a research project called AirSim, a high-fidelity system for testing the safety of artificial intelligence systems. AirSim provides realistic environments, vehicle dynamics and sensing for research into how autonomous vehicles that use AI that can…