RI Seminar
Snakes & Spiders, Robots & Geometry
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 [...]
Robotic Cave Exploration for Search, Science, and Survey
Abstract: Robotic cave exploration has the potential to create significant societal impact through facilitating search and rescue, in the fight against antibiotic resistance (science), and via mapping (survey). But many state-of-the-art approaches for active perception and autonomy in subterranean environments rely on disparate perceptual pipelines (e.g., pose estimation, occupancy modeling, hazard detection) that process the same underlying sensor data in different [...]
Safe and Stable Learning for Agile Robots without Reinforcement Learning
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 [...]
Towards $1 robots
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 [...]
What (else) can you do with a robotics degree?
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 [...]
Robots Should Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle
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 [...]
Machine Learning and Model Predictive Control for Adaptive Robotic Systems
Abstract: In this talk I will discuss several different ways in which ideas from machine learning and model predictive control (MPC) can be combined to build intelligent, adaptive robotic systems. I’ll begin by showing how to learn models for MPC that perform well on a given control task. Next, I’ll introduce an online learning perspective on [...]
Learning Representations for Interactive Robotics
In this talk, I will be discussing the role of learning representations for robots that interact with humans and robots that interactively learn from humans through a few different vignettes. I will first discuss how bounded rationality of humans guided us towards developing learned latent action spaces for shared autonomy. It turns out this “bounded rationality” is not a [...]
Motion Planning Around Obstacles with Graphs of Convex Sets
Abstract: In this talk, I'll describe a new approach to planning that strongly leverages both continuous and discrete/combinatorial optimization. The framework is fairly general, but I will focus on a particular application of the framework to planning continuous curves around obstacles. Traditionally, these sort of motion planning problems have either been solved by trajectory optimization [...]
RE2 Robotics: from RI spinout to Acquisition
Abstract: It was July 2001. Jorgen Pedersen founded RE2 Robotics. It was supposed to be a temporary venture while he figured out his next career move. But the journey took an unexpected course. RE2 became a leading developer of mobile manipulation systems. Fast forward to 2022, RE2 Robotics exited via an acquisition to Sarcos Technology and [...]