RI Seminar

Abstract: Despite its diverse areas of application, the desire to optimize performance and guarantee acceptable behaviour in the face of inevitable uncertainty is pervasive throughout control theory. This creates a fundamental challenge since the necessity of robustly stable control schemes often favors conservative designs, while the desire to optimize performance typically demands the opposite. While [...]

Abstract: Physically collaborative robots present an opportunity to positively impact society across many domains. However, robots currently lack the ability to infer how their actions physically affect people. This is especially true for robotic caregiving tasks that involve manipulating deformable cloth around the human body, such as dressing and bathing assistance. In this talk, I [...]

Abstract: Many robotic applications require a robot to operate in an environment with unknowns or uncertainty, at least initially, before it gathers enough information about the environment. In such a case, a robot must rely on sensing and perception to feel its way around. Moreover, it has to couple sensing/perception and motion synergistically in real [...]

Abstract: Natural swarms exhibit sophisticated colony-level behaviors with remarkable scalability and error tolerance. Their evolutionary success stems from more than just intelligent individuals, it hinges on their morphology, their physical interactions, and the way they shape and leverage their environment. Mound-building termites, for instance, are believed to use their own body as a template for [...]

Abstract: Locomotion and perception are a common thread between robotics and biology. Understanding these phenomena at a mechanical level involves nonlinear dynamics and the coordination of many degrees of freedom. In this talk, I will discuss geometric approaches to organizing this information in two problem domains: Undulatory locomotion of snakes and swimmers, and vibration propagation [...]

Abstract: My research group (https://aerospacerobotics.caltech.edu/) is working to systematically leverage AI and Machine Learning techniques towards achieving safe and stable autonomy of safety-critical robotic systems, such as robot swarms and autonomous flying cars. Another example is LEONARDO, the world's first bipedal robot that can walk, fly, slackline, and skateboard. Stability and safety are often research problems [...]

Abstract: Robots are pretty great -- they can make some hard tasks easy, some dangerous tasks safe, or some unthinkable tasks possible.  And they're just plain fun to boot.  But how many robots have you interacted with recently?  And where do you think that puts you compared to the rest of the world's people? In [...]

Abstract: In 2004, half-way through my robotics Ph.D., I had a panic-inducing thought: What if I don’t want to build robots for the rest of my life? What can I do with this degree?! Nearly twenty years later, I have some answers: tackle climate change in Latin America, educate Congress about autonomous vehicles, improve how [...]

Abstract: Despite numerous successes in deep robotic learning over the past decade, the generalization and versatility of robots across environments and tasks has remained a major challenge. This is because much of reinforcement and imitation learning research trains agents from scratch in a single or a few environments, training special-purpose policies from special-purpose datasets. In [...]