RI Seminar

Abstract:  Humans haptically perceive the material properties of objects, such as roughness and compliance, through signals from sensory receptors in skin, muscles, tendons, and joints.  Approaches to haptic rendering of material properties operate by stimulating, or attempting to stimulate, some or all of these receptor populations.  My talk will describe research on haptic perception of [...]

Abstract:  I argue that there is an important sense in which all decisions are moral decisions and I explore some implications of this insight (and its denial) for the design and human impacts of increasingly complex automated systems and emerging autonomous systems.  This insight is obscured when we think about automated systems by the social [...]

Abstract: Why is our understanding of sensorimotor control behind our understanding of perception? I will talk about structural differences between perception and control, and how these differences can be mitigated to help advance sensorimotor control systems. Judicious use of simulation can play an important role and I will describe some simulation tools that we have [...]

Abstract: The heart of a camera and one of the pillars for computer vision is the digital photodetector, a device that forms images by collecting billions of photons traveling through the physical world and into the lens of a camera.  While the photodetectors used by cellphones or professional DSLR cameras are designed to aggregate as [...]

Abstract: In this talk, Herman Herman will offer various lessons learned from developing various robots for the last 2 decades at the National Robotics Engineering Center. He will also offer his perspective on the future of autonomous robots in various industries, including self-driving cars, material handling and consumer robotics. Bio: Dr. Herman Herman is the [...]

Abstract: Factor graphs have become a popular tool for modeling robot perception problems. Not only can they model the bipartite relationship between sensor measurements and variables of interest for inference, but they have also been instrumental in devising novel inference algorithms that exploit the spatial and temporal structure inherent in these problems. I will overview [...]

Abstract: Nobel prize winner M. G. Lippmann described his dream of an ideal display as a “window into the world.”  “While the current most perfect photographic print only shows one aspect of reality, reduced to a single image fixed in a plane, the direct view of reality offers, as we know, infinitely more variety.” Changing [...]

Abstract: A long-standing question in HRI is what effects a robot’s human-like appearance has on various psychological responses.  A substantial literature has demonstrated such effects on liking, trust, ascribed intelligence, and so on.  Much of this work has relied on a construct of uni-dimensional low to high human-likeness. I introduce evidence for an alternative view according to which [...]

Abstract: A great deal of research in recent years has focused on robot learning.  In many applications, guarantees that specifications are satisfied throughout the learning process are paramount. For the safety specification, we present a controller synthesis technique based on the computation of reachable sets, using optimal control and game theory.  In the first part [...]

Abstract: The Arctic, Antarctic and Greenland remain some of the least explored parts of the planet. This talk looks at efforts over the last decade to explore areas under-ice which have traditionally been difficult to access. The focus of the talk will be on the robots, the role of communications over low bandwidth acoustic links, [...]

Abstract: In the future, robots could be used to take care of the elderly, perform household chores, and assist in hazardous situations. However, such applications require robots to manipulate objects in unstructured and everyday environments. Hence, in order to perform a wide range of tasks, robots will need to learn manipulation skills that generalize between [...]

Abstract: While recent years have seen dramatic progress in the development of affordable, general-purpose robot hardware, the capabilities of that hardware far exceed our ability to write software to adequately control. The key challenge here is one of abstraction: generally capable behavior requires high-level reasoning and planning, but perception and actuation must ultimately be performed [...]