2019 RI National Robotics Week Celebration - Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University

Special Events

April

11
Thu
Thursday, April 11
12:00 pm to 5:30 pm
Newell-Simon Hall 3305
2019 RI National Robotics Week Celebration

The Robotics Institute will celebrate the tenth annual National Robotics Week on April 11 & 12 with lectures, project demonstrations, the annual Mobot (mobile robot) races, and a reception for RI affiliated people.

REGISTRATION IS NOW OPEN

REGISTER HERE

If you have any specific questions about the National Robotics Week open
house please email Debbie Tobin at dmz@cs.cmu.edu.

Schedule of Events:

April 11
12:00 – 1:30 p.m.: Teruko Yata Memorial Lecture in Robotics

Speaker: Henny Admoni, Assistant Professor, Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University
Title: Understanding Human Behavior for Robotic Assistance and Collaboration
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Human-robot collaboration has the potential to transform the way people work and live. Researchers are currently developing robots that assist people in public spaces, on the job, and in their homes. To be effective assistants, these robots must be able to recognize aspects of their human partners such as what their goals are, what their next action will be, and when they need help—in short, their task-relevant mental states. A large part of communication about mental states occurs nonverbally, through eye gaze, gestures, and other behaviors that provide implicit information. Therefore, to be effective collaborators, robots must understand nonverbal human communication as well as generate sufficiently expressive nonverbal behaviors that are understandable by their human partners. Developing effective human-robot interactions requires a multidisciplinary approach that involves fundamental robotics algorithms, insights from human psychology, and techniques from artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computer vision. In this talk, I will describe my work on robots that collaborate with and assist humans on complex tasks, such as eating a meal. I will show how robots can guide human action using nonverbal behaviors, and how natural, intuitive human behaviors can reveal human mental states that robots must respond to. Throughout the talk, I will describe how techniques and knowledge from cognitive science help us develop robot algorithms that lead to more effective interactions between people and their robot partners.
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Bio:
Henny Admoni is an Assistant Professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where she leads the Human And Robot Partners (HARP) Lab. Henny studies how to develop intelligent robots that can assist and collaborate with humans on complex tasks like preparing a meal. She is most interested in how natural human behavior, like where someone is looking, can reveal underlying human mental states and can be used to improve human-robot interactions. Henny’s research has been supported by the US National Science Foundation, the US Office of Naval Research, the Paralyzed Veterans of America Foundation, and Sony Corporation. Her work has been featured by the media such as NPR’s Science Friday, Voice of America News, and WESA radio.

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About the Lecture: The Yata Memorial Lecture in Robotics is part of the School of Computer Science Distinguished Lecture Series. Teruko Yata was a postdoctoral fellow in the Robotics Institute from 2000 until her untimely death in 2002. After graduating from the University of Tsukuba, working under the guidance of Prof. Yuta, she came to the United States. At Carnegie Mellon, she served as a post-doctoral fellow in the Robotics Institute for three years, under Chuck Thorpe. Teruko’s accomplishments in the field of ultrasonic sensing were highly regarded and won her the Best Student Paper Award at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation in 1999. It was frequently noted, and we always remember, that “the quality of her work was exceeded only by her kindness and thoughtfulness as a friend.” Join us in paying tribute to our extraordinary colleague and friend through this most unique and exciting lecture.

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A School of Computer Science Distinguished Lecture
Rashid Auditorium – 4401 Gates and Hillman Centers
Pre-registration is required.
Box lunches will be available for those who register by April 8.

 

 

April 12

 

12:00 – 4:00 pm: ROBOTICS INSTITUTE LAB TOURS
Pre-registration is required.

Intelligent Autonomous Manipulation Lab

NSH A504

Demonstrating manipulation skills working of robot arms, with a focus on manipulating deformable objects and materials.

The Intelliegent Autonomous Manipulation (IAM) Lab at the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Robotics Institute brings together researchers to address the challenges of creating general purpose robots that are capable of performing manipulation tasks in unstructured and everyday environments. Our research focuses on developing learning methods for robots to model tasks and acquire versatile and robust manipulation skills in a sample-efficient manner. The ability to learn skills and adapt manipulations to new situations will open up a wide range of new robot applications, including deployment in hospitals, elder- and child-care, factories, space, restaurants, service industries, disaster scenarios, and the home.

https://www.cmu.edu/robotics-institute/iamlab/

 

Human And Robot Partners (HARP) Lab

NSH 4502

Demonstrating an assistive robot that helps people with motor impairments perform everyday tasks like eating food.

 

The goal of the Human And Robot Partners (HARP) lab is to understand and develop autonomous, intelligent robots that help people live better. Our robots engage people through social and physical interactions, monitoring human behavior to understand and predict the types of help people need. Our lab’s expertise includes robotics, human-robot interaction, machine learning, computer vision, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, and cognitive science. Application domains include assistive robot manipulators for people with motor impairments, robot tutors for education, and robot therapy assistants for people with cognitive or social disabilities.

http://harp.ri.cmu.edu/ Lab Tours

Intelligent Autonomous Manipulation Lab

NSH A504

Oliver Kroemer okroemer@andrew.cmu.edu

Demonstrating manipulation skills working of robot arms, with a focus on manipulating deformable objects and materials.

The Intelliegent Autonomous Manipulation (IAM) Lab at the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Robotics Institute brings together researchers to address the challenges of creating general purpose robots that are capable of performing manipulation tasks in unstructured and everyday environments. Our research focuses on developing learning methods for robots to model tasks and acquire versatile and robust manipulation skills in a sample-efficient manner. The ability to learn skills and adapt manipulations to new situations will open up a wide range of new robot applications, including deployment in hospitals, elder- and child-care, factories, space, restaurants, service industries, disaster scenarios, and the home.

https://www.cmu.edu/robotics-institute/iamlab/

12:00 – 4:00 pm: 
ROBOTICS INSTITUTE ROBOT DEMONSTRATIONS
Location: Newell-Simon Hall Perlis Atrium, 3rd floor
Open to the public.

Biorobotics Lab Matt Equals Six Robot

Biorobotics.org

The Biorobotics Lab reduces complicated high-dimensional problems found in robotics to low-dimensional simpler ones for design, analysis, and planning. Often, we look to biology for inspiration and sometimes, we return the favor by providing analysis that models biology.

 

Calypso for Cozmo

https://Calypso.software

Calypso for Cozmo is kid-friendly software that makes artificial intelligence-based robot programming accessible to anyone.  Calypso uses the Cozmo robot by Anki, available at Amazon.  Calypso was developed by Visionary Machines LLC, a CMU-affiliated startup

 

Robomechanics Lab

http://robomechanics.net

The robomechanics lab will be demonstrating several legged and wheeled robots designed to work on challenging terrain, including the four legged minitaur robot, the six legged RHex and mini-RHex, a 2 legged flamingo robot, and more

 

Butterfly Haptics

www.butterflyhaptics.com

“Haptics is the science and technology of touch.  We will demonstrate the Butterfly Haptics Maglev 200 haptic interface system which uses magnetic levitation to provide users with high fidelity touch feedback with 3D virtual and remote robot environments.   Several examples of 3D virtual environments can be explored by visitors.  Butterfly Haptics is a spin-off from CMU and shipped its first product in 2009.

 

DiscoBot & NanoPiper

“US bomb making in the 20th century resulted in the rapid creation of massive nuclear facilities. These are now defunct, heavily contaminated and facing decommissioning. As part of a multi-billion dollar agenda, the measurement of radioactivity is required for the safe disposal of contaminated material. Manual techniques have proven too approximate, slow, and inefficient for this need.

NanoPiper is a modular robot that operates inside the smallest 3″ pipes in these facilities to precisely measure the Uranium. NanoPiper eliminates error and uncertainty caused by pipe wall attenuation and operator inconsistency. NanoPiper builds a robust and accurate radioactive model using newly-invented acoustic localization, state of the art geometric profiling and miniaturized radiation sensing.

By creating this class of robots, we have greatly extended nuclear measurement capabilities, accelerated the decommissioning process, minimized costs and greatly reduced operator risk.”

 

Girls of Steel

The Girls of Steel is an all-girls FIRST Robotics Competition team hosted at and mentored by RI’s Field Robotics Center. It is composed of approximately 40 girls from about 20 high schools in the Pittsburgh region.

 

12:00 – 2:00 pm: 
25TH ANNUAL MOBOT RACE
Location: Walkway outside of Wean Hall
Open to the public.

The School of Computer Science invites all members of the Carnegie Mellon community to participate in The 25th Annual Carnegie Mellon Mobot Races, in Spring 2019 (April 12!). Participants will race autonomous vehicles (“MObile roBOTs”) they have built along a slalom-type course on the paved walk in front of Wean Hall.

The purpose of the competition is to generate technological excitement, provide hands-on experience for our undergraduates, and showcase the cleverness and technical competence of Carnegie Mellon undergraduates and other community members (including alumni). We hope to stimulate inter-disciplinary activity toward producing something that is technically noteworthy.

Race of autonomous vehicles (MObile roBOTs) along a slalom course on the paved walk in front of Wean Hall.

 

3:00 – 4:00 pm: 
THE 15TH GATE: MOBOT AWARD CEREMONY and WRAP-UP
Location: Rashid Auditorium – Gates & Hillman 4401
Open to the public.

 

4:00 – 5:30 pm: 
ROBOT RECEPTION
Location: Newell-Simon Hall Perlis Atrium, 3rd floor
Pre-registration is required.