The team of Xinshuo Weng and Ye Yuan, both Ph.D. students in the Robotics Institute, is one of 13 nationwide to win a 2020 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (QIF).

The QIF program is unusual because it requires pairs of students to submit proposals. Qualcomm says this approach reflects its core values of innovation, execution and partnership. Finalists are selected by the company's top engineers, and students then must present their proposal to a panel of executive judges.

The proposal by Weng and Yuan, "3D Multi-Agent Social Interaction Understanding and Diverse Future Behavior Forecasting," addresses how next-generation autonomous artificial intelligence systems — such as self-driving vehicles, delivery drones and assistive robots — can interact safely with agents such as people, animals and other robots.

They will work to develop detection and tracking algorithms that can learn how these agents are related to one another using video and LiDAR point cloud data. Based on the system's knowledge of how the agents interact, the perception system will be able to predict what the agents will do a few seconds into the future. They plan to validate the system by testing it in crowded environments with a large number of people and robots.

Qualcomm engineers will mentor Weng and Yuan as they develop their system during the yearlong fellowship.