Seminar
High-resolution cloth simulation in milliseconds: Efficient GPU Cloth Simulation with Non-distance Barriers and Subspace Reuse Interactions
Abstract: We show how to push the performance of high-resolution cloth simulation, making the simulation interactive (in milliseconds) for models with one million degrees of freedom (DOFs) while keeping every triangle untangled. The guarantee of being penetration-free is inspired by the interior-point method, which converts the inequality constraints to barrier potentials. Nevertheless, we propose a [...]
Practical Challenges and Recent Advances in Data Attribution
Abstract: Data plays an increasingly crucial role in both the performance and the safety of AI models. Data attribution is an emerging family of techniques aimed at quantifying the impact of individual training data points on a model trained on them, which has found data-centric applications such as training data curation, instance-based explanation, and copyright [...]
From Lab to Launch
Bio: Nathan Michael is Shield AI’s Chief Technology Officer and a former Associate Research Professor in the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). At CMU, Nathan was the Director of the Resilient Intelligent Systems Lab, a research lab dedicated to improving the performance and reliability of artificially intelligent and autonomous systems that operate in [...]
Uncertainty and Contact with the World
Abstract: As robots move out of the lab and factory and into more challenging environments, uncertainty in the robot's state, dynamics, and contact conditions becomes a fact of life. We will never be able to perfectly predict the forces on the robot's feet as it walks through unknown mud or control the deflections of a [...]
Towards Open World Robot Safety
Abstract: Robot safety is a nuanced concept. We commonly equate safety with collision-avoidance, but in complex, real-world environments (i.e., the “open world’’) it can be much more: for example, a mobile manipulator should understand when it is not confident about a requested task, that areas roped off by caution tape should never be breached, and [...]
RI Seminar with Alfred Rizzi
Unfamiliar Intelligence: Art, AI, and Robots
Abstract: Shortly after the 1918 pandemic, the word "robot" was coined in a play about mechanical workers organizing a rebellion to defeat their human overlords. A century later, emerging advances in Artificial Intelligence and robotics, fueled by venture capital and governments, are disrupting labor, trade, and political stability. Claims about “superintelligence” and existential threats to [...]
RI Seminar with Nima Fazeli
RI Seminar with Nikolay Atanasov
Physical Intelligence and Cognitive Biases Toward AI
Abstract: When will robots be able to clean my house, dishes, and take care of laundry? While we source labor primarily from automated machines in factories, the penetration of physical robots in our daily lives has been slow. What are the challenges in realizing these intelligent machines capable of human level skill? Isn’t AI advanced [...]