The Intelligent Robot Lab at Brown

The Intelligent Robot Lab is dedicated to the development of autonomous robots capable of generally intelligent behavior across a wide range of tasks and environments.

The IRL is directed by Professor George Konidaris, and is based in the Department of Computer Science at Brown University. It was formerly based at Duke, as part of Duke Robotics.

The IRL is part of bigAI (Brown Integrative, General AI), a collection of of like-minded research labs at Brown. We are focused in tackling the general AI problem, which we believe means the development of intelligent robots (fully-fledged embodied, autonomous agents) capable of achieving competence at a very wide range of tasks, rather than excellence at a single task.

The IRL conducts interdisciplinary research spanning robotics, reinforcement learning, machine learning, task and motion planning, computer vision, and artificial intelligence, though our research can often be broadly categorized as falling into the areas of intelligent robotics, mobile manipulation, and reinforcement learning.

We are generally focused on building complete intelligent agents rather than making narrow algorthmic advances, so we both develop new algorithms and discover new ways to integrate existing algorithms into complete systems that work in the real world.

The IRL also collaborates closely with the RAIL (Robotics, Autonomous Intelligence, and Learning) lab at the School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics in the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. This collaboration, which is focused on reinforcement learning, skill acquisition, and transfer, has already resulted in multiple PhDs granted and several jointly-authored publications, with many more to come.

The IRL is immensely grateful for the funding sources that allow us to do what we do:

           
           

Please feel free to browse our site to see the students and researchers who make up the IRL, a few research highlights, a list of our publications, and the software we have developed and made available.