RI Seminar

Abstract: Haptic devices allow touch-based information transfer between humans and intelligent systems, enabling communication in a salient but private manner that frees other sensory channels. For such devices to become ubiquitous, their physical and computational aspects must be intuitive and unobtrusive. The amount of information that can be transmitted through touch is limited in large [...]

Abstract: Recent breathtaking advances in AI and robotics have brought us closer to building general-purpose robots in the real world, e.g., humanoids capable of performing a wide range of human tasks in complex environments. Two key challenges in realizing such general-purpose robots are: (1) achieving "breadth" in task/environment diversity, i.e., the generalist aspect, and (2) [...]

Abstract: Foundation models from machine learning have enabled rapid advances in perception, planning, and natural language understanding for robots. However, current systems lack any rigorous assurances when required to generalize to novel scenarios. For example, perception systems can fail to identify or localize unfamiliar objects, and large language model (LLM)-based planners can hallucinate outputs that [...]