RI Seminar
Kirstin H. Petersen
Assistant Professor
Electrical & Computer Engineering, College of Engineering, Cornell University

Designing Robotic Systems with Collective Embodied Intelligence

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 [...]

RI Seminar
Ross L. Hatton
Associate Professor
Robotics & Mechanical Engineering , Oregon State University

Snakes & Spiders, Robots & Geometry

Newell-Simon Hall 4305

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 [...]

RI Seminar
Systems Scientist
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Robotic Cave Exploration for Search, Science, and Survey

1305 Newell Simon Hall

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 [...]

RI Seminar
Soon-Jo Chung
Bren Professor of Aerospace and Control and Dynamical Systems
Department of Aerospace , Caltech

Safe and Stable Learning for Agile Robots without Reinforcement Learning

1305 Newell Simon Hall

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 [...]

RI Seminar
Ankur Mehta
Assistant Professor & Samueli Fellow
Electrical & Computer Engineering, UCLA

Towards $1 robots

1305 Newell Simon Hall

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 [...]

RI Seminar
Nidhi Kalra
Senior Information Scientist
RAND Corporation

What (else) can you do with a robotics degree?

1305 Newell Simon Hall

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 [...]

RI Seminar
Chelsea Finn
Assistant Professor
Computer Science & Electrical Engineering, Stanford University

Robots Should Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle

1305 Newell Simon Hall

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 [...]

RI Seminar
Byron Boots
Amazon Professor
Machine Learning in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science, University of Washington

Machine Learning and Model Predictive Control for Adaptive Robotic Systems

1305 Newell Simon Hall

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 [...]

RI Seminar
Dorsa Sadigh
Assistant Professor
Computer Science Electrical Engineering, Stanford University

Learning Representations for Interactive Robotics

Newell-Simon Hall 1305

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 [...]

RI Seminar
Russ Tedrake
Professor
Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, MIT

Motion Planning Around Obstacles with Graphs of Convex Sets

1305 Newell Simon Hall

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 [...]