Pete Wurman
Profile
Pete received his undergraduate degree from MIT in Mechanical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Michigan. He spent 6 years as a professor at North Carolina State University before leaving in 2004 to help co-found Kiva Systems, the company that pioneered mobile robots in warehousing. Kiva was acquired by Amazon in 2012 and has deployed hundreds of thousands of robots to Amazon warehouses around the world. For their invention, Pete and his co-founders were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2022. While at Amazon, Pete also founded the Amazon Picking Challenge. Pete has over 50 academic papers and 60 patents, and is an IEEE Fellow and AAAI Fellow.
Publications
Discovering Creative Behaviors through DUPLEX: Diverse Universal Features for Policy Exploration
NEURIPS, 2024 | Borja G. Leon*, Francesco Riccio, Kaushik Subramanian, Pete Wurman, Peter Stone
The ability to approach the same problem from different angles is a cornerstone of human intelligence that leads to robust solutions and effective adaptation to problem variations. In contrast, current RL methodologies tend to lead to policies that settle on a single solutio...
A Super-human Vision-based Reinforcement Learning Agent for Autonomous Racing in Gran Turismo
RLC, 2024 | Miguel Vasco*, Takuma Seno, Kenta Kawamoto, Kaushik Subramanian, Pete Wurman, Peter Stone
Racing autonomous cars faster than the best human drivers has been a longstanding grand challenge for the fields of Artificial Intelligence and robotics. Recently, an end-to-end deep reinforcement learning agent met this challenge in a high-fidelity racing simulator, Gran Tu...
Outracing Champion Gran Turismo Drivers with Deep Reinforcement Learning
NATURE, 2022 | Pete Wurman, Samuel Barrett, Kenta Kawamoto, James MacGlashan, Kaushik Subramanian, Thomas Walsh, Roberto Capobianco, Alisa Devlic, Franziska Eckert, Florian Fuchs, Leilani Gilpin, Piyush Khandelwal, Varun Kompella, Hao Chih Lin, Patrick MacAlpine, Declan Oller, Takuma Seno, Craig Sherstan, Michael D. Thomure, Houmehr Aghabozorgi, Leon Barrett, Rory Douglas, Dion Whitehead Amago, Peter Dürr, Peter Stone, Michael Spranger, Hiroaki Kitano
Many potential applications of artificial intelligence involve making real-time decisions in physical systems while interacting with humans. Automobile racing represents an extreme example of these conditions; drivers must execute complex tactical manoeuvres to pass or block...
Agent-Based Markov Modeling for Improved COVID-19 Mitigation Policies
JAIR, 2021 | Roberto Capobianco, Varun Kompella, James Ault*, Guni Sharon*, Stacy Jong*, Spencer Fox*, Lauren Meyers*, Pete Wurman, Peter Stone
The year 2020 saw the covid-19 virus lead to one of the worst global pandemics in history. As a result, governments around the world have been faced with the challenge of protecting public health while keeping the economy running to the greatest extent possible. Epidemiologi...
Efficient Real-Time Inference in Temporal Convolution Networks
ICRA, 2021 | Piyush Khandelwal, James MacGlashan, Pete Wurman, Peter Stone
It has been recently demonstrated that Temporal Convolution Networks (TCNs) provide state-of-the-art results in many problem domains where the input data is a time-series. TCNs typically incorporate information from a long history of inputs (the receptive field) into a singl...
Reinforcement Learning for Optimization of COVID-19 Mitigation Policies
AAAI AI FOR SOCIAL GOOD, 2020 | Varun Kompella, Roberto Capobianco, Stacy Jong*, Jonathan Browne*, Spencer Fox*, Lauren Meyers*, Pete Wurman, Peter Stone
The year 2020 has seen the COVID-19 virus lead to one of the worst global pandemics in history. As a result, governments around the world are faced with the challenge of protecting public health, while keeping the economy running to the greatest extent possible. Epidemiologi...
Blog Posts
Event Tables for Efficient Experience Replay
December 14, 2023 | Peter Stone, Pete Wurman, Game AI, GT Sophy, Thomas Walsh, Samuel Barrett, Varun Kompella
Each of us carries a core set of experiences, events that stand out as particularly important and have shaped our lives more than an average day. ...
RPOSST: Testing an AI Agent for Deployment in the Real World
December 5, 2023 | Peter Stone, Pete Wurman, Game AI, Thomas Walsh, Dustin Morrill
Bleary-eyed engineers know the anxiety that comes with a deployment, and the importance of testing every aspect of a product before it goes to the ...
Peeking Under the Hood of GT Sophy
June 14, 2022 | Gaming, Pete Wurman, GT Sophy
In early 2020, the incredible research and engineering team at Sony AI set out to do something that had never been done before: create an AI agent ...