RI Seminar
Autonomous Robotic Surgery: Science Fiction or Reality?
Abstract: Robotic assisted surgery (RAS) systems incorporate highly dexterous tools, hand tremor filtering, and motion scaling to enable a minimally invasive surgical approach, reducing collateral damage and patient recovery times. However, current state-of-the-art telerobotic surgery requires a surgeon operating every motion of the robot, resulting in long procedure times and inconsistent results. The advantages of [...]
Learning for Dynamic Robot Manipulation of Deformable and Transparent Objects
Abstract: Dynamics, softness, deformability, and difficult-to-detect objects will be critical for new domains in robotic manipulation. But there are complications--including unmodelled dynamic effects, infinite-dimensional state spaces of deformable objects, and missing features from perception. This talk explores learning methods based on multi-view sensing, acoustics, physics-based regularizations, and Koopman operators and proposes a novel multi-finger soft [...]
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 [...]
Developing Physically Capable and Intelligent Robots
Abstract: Dr. Rizzi will provide an overview of the ongoing work at the Robotics and AI Institute (RAI Institute) and its ongoing research efforts focused on the design and control of the next generation of intelligent and capable robotics systems. The focus is on the development of systems capable of performing complex dynamic tasks at [...]
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 [...]
