Speech of Professor Hari on Autonomous Navigation

On 2nd of June 2023 Professor K. V. S. Hari, from Department of ECE, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, presented his research on Experiments in Autonomous Navigation for Unstructured Environments. The event took place at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens. The presentation was followed by a very interesting conversation considering the future of the autonomous navigation and potentional uses. Our Research Team and all the attendees would like to thank and congratulate Professor Hari for his interesting speech and we are looking forward to continuing this interaction in the future. An abstract of his speech and information about the speaker follow below:

ABSTRACT: The emergence of autonomous navigation systems have spurred many innovations in the design of sensing, computing, communication and control systems. The design of autonomous navigation systems in unstructured environments is a challenging problem. For example, in an opencast or open-pit coal mine, large vehicles are driven on muddy roads with no lanes and roadside markers. Such environments pose a unique challenge to the design of autonomous systems. Similarly, urban environments where there is heavy traffic congestion with a large variety of vehicles and associated varied user behavior pose a challenge to designing autonomous navigation systems. In this talk, we will present two case studies. The first case study presents the design of a forward collision avoidance system for large vehicles using only a single webcam. This work was supported by VOLVO. The second case study presents the design of a sensing system to collect data for Indian road traffic and apply deep learning tools for detecting vehicles and predicting their trajectories. This work is supported by WIPRO.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: K V S Hari is a Professor in the Department of ECE, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He holds a PhD (Systems Science) from U C San Diego, an MTech (Radar and Communication Engineering) from IIT Delhi and a B.E (ECE) from Osmania University College of Engineering, He has been a visiting faculty at Stanford University and Affiliate Professor at KTH- Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. His research interests are in Signal Processing and Deep Learning with applications to 5G wireless communications, dual function radar and communication systems, autonomous navigation, neuroscience, and affordable MRI systems.
He is a co-author of the IEEE 802.16 standard on wireless channel models and has conducted drone-ground wireless channel modelling experiments. He is part of the UK-India Future Networks Initiative (UKI-FNI) and currently leads the British Telecom India Research Centre (BTIRC), IISc. He served as the Chair, Standardisation Committee, Telecom Standards Development Society, India.
He was an Editor of EURASIP’s Signal Processingjournal and is currently the Editor-in-Chief (Electrical Sciences) of Sadhana, the journal of the Indian Academy of Sciences published by Springer. He is a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering, Indian National Science Academy and IEEE. He was on the Board of Governors, IEEE Signal Processing Society as VP-Membership(2020-22). He is the General Co-Chair of ICASSP 2025 scheduled in Hyderabad, India.
More details at http://ece.iisc.ac.in/~hari