February 2024 - Robotics-seminar - Engineering Mailing Lists

No Seminar this Week
by Smart, William 27 Feb '24

27 Feb '24

Roboticists, Just a reminder that there will be no seminar this week, because of grad student visit day. -- Bill

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Robotics Seminar Tomorrow
by Smart, William 22 Feb '24

22 Feb '24

Roboticists, just a reminder about the seminar tomorrow: Making it through your degree program is hard. Progress can sometimes seem slow and it’s all too easy to wonder if this is the right path. Join us for the first of a pair of special seminars where members of the robotics program talk about their time in graduate school, the challenges they faced and overcome, and suggest some practical strategies to help you as you work towards your degree. Coffee, cake, and community. 10am, Rogers 230, as always. cheers -- Bill

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Robotics Seminar 2/23: What am I Doing Here (Part 1)?
by Smart, William 22 Feb '24

22 Feb '24

Roboticists, Making it through your degree program is hard. Progress can sometimes seem slow and it’s all too easy to wonder if this is the right path. Join us for the first of a pair of special seminars where members of the robotics program talk about their time in graduate school, the challenges they faced and overcome, and suggest some practical strategies to help you as you work towards your degree. Coffee, cake, and community. 10am, Rogers 230, as always. cheers -- Bill

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Robotics Seminar 2/16: Devin Roach (OSU)
by Smart, William 15 Feb '24

15 Feb '24

Roboticsits, Just a reminder to join us tomorrow for a seminar with our own Dr. Devin Roach, to hear about his work with 3D printing of shape morphing materials, to drink coffee, and to eat cake. cheers -- Bill 4D Printing: 3D Printing of Shape Morphing Materials for Soft Robotics Devin Roach, Oregon State University Abstract: 3D printing is well-known for its ability to place a wide variety of materials at precise locations in 3D space with very few limitations on geometrical complexity. Recent advances in active, shape morphing polymers have enabled the design of structures which can change their shape in response to external stimuli such as temperature, light, or water. By combining shape morphing soft materials and 3D printing, a new paradigm of 4D printing can be realized where printed objects can perform actuations directly after printing. The complex shape design offered by 3D printing can be leveraged to generate soft actuators with previously unseen complexity. This talk will focus on how 4D printing of actuators can be used to realize novel soft robotics applications from crawlers to drug delivery systems. Bio: Devin is an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Department at Oregon State University (OSU). Prior to his time at OSU, he was a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories leading a research group focusing on applied machine learning methods for real-time monitoring and autonomous optimization of additive manufacturing systems. He received his PhD from Georgia Institute of Technology under the direction of Prof. H Jerry Qi. His research interest lie at the cross-section of additive manufacturing, materials, and structural design. He is particularly interested in how artificial intelligence can be applied to improve and even automate additive manufacturing processes to eliminate user error. Additionally, he is interested in the development and manufacturing of smart/active materials such as shape memory polymers (SMP) and liquid crystal elastomers (LCE) for applications in biomedical devices, soft robotics, and energy harvesting devices.

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Robotics Seminar 2/16: Devin Roach (OSU)
by Smart, William 13 Feb '24

13 Feb '24

Roboticists, Join us for another seminar this Friday, with new OSU faculty member Devin Roach. Dr. Roach is officially in Manufacturing Engineering, but he’s also a stealth soft roboticist. Come meet him, and hear about his work in 3D printing of shape morphing materials this Friday at 10am in Rogers 230. Coffee and cake, as always. If you’re a grad student, plan on staying for the grad student session afterwards. cheers -- Bill 4D Printing: 3D Printing of Shape Morphing Materials for Soft Robotics Devin Roach, Oregon State University Abstract: 3D printing is well-known for its ability to place a wide variety of materials at precise locations in 3D space with very few limitations on geometrical complexity. Recent advances in active, shape morphing polymers have enabled the design of structures which can change their shape in response to external stimuli such as temperature, light, or water. By combining shape morphing soft materials and 3D printing, a new paradigm of 4D printing can be realized where printed objects can perform actuations directly after printing. The complex shape design offered by 3D printing can be leveraged to generate soft actuators with previously unseen complexity. This talk will focus on how 4D printing of actuators can be used to realize novel soft robotics applications from crawlers to drug delivery systems. Bio: Devin is an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Department at Oregon State University (OSU). Prior to his time at OSU, he was a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories leading a research group focusing on applied machine learning methods for real-time monitoring and autonomous optimization of additive manufacturing systems. He received his PhD from Georgia Institute of Technology under the direction of Prof. H Jerry Qi. His research interest lie at the cross-section of additive manufacturing, materials, and structural design. He is particularly interested in how artificial intelligence can be applied to improve and even automate additive manufacturing processes to eliminate user error. Additionally, he is interested in the development and manufacturing of smart/active materials such as shape memory polymers (SMP) and liquid crystal elastomers (LCE) for applications in biomedical devices, soft robotics, and energy harvesting devices.

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OMIC Talk on Monday
by Smart, William 09 Feb '24

09 Feb '24

Roboticists, Jordan Meader, program alum, will be giving a talk about his work at OMIC, and doing some internship recruiting on Monday 2/12, at 2pm, in Rogers 226. Come an hear about the cool robotics work they’re doing, and what life after the program is like. cheers -- Bill Event Description Jordan Meader will talk about his experiences in the real world, and how what they learned in the Robotics Program prepared them (or not) for the jobs that they have now. There will be an extended question-and-answer session for this seminar, so come armed with extra questions. Speaker Biography Jordan Meader is the Robotics Solutions Researcher at OMIC R&D. Jordan’s interests lie in robotic manipulation and the development of novel automation technologies in manufacturing. In robotic manipulation, Jordan experiments with new end of arm tools designed to tackle new manufacturing problems whilst removing common failure points in the hardware. In automation, Jordan acts as a consultant providing insight to new processes for large manufacturers and voicing industry needs to integrators. At OMIC, Jordan’s lab is responsible for overseeing all projects involving robotics, automation or that contain a high demand for electronics. Jordan serves as the onsite tech for IT, networking, computer hardware/software, machine troubleshooting/repair, etc. If it runs on electricity, there’s a chance Jordan touched it.

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Robotics Seminar 2/9: Nadia Figueroa (UPenn)
by Smart, William 08 Feb '24

08 Feb '24

Roboticists, Join us this Friday for a seminar by Nadia Figueroa from UPenn, where she will talk about her work in physical human-robot interaction. Usual time, usual place, usual human-coffee interaction. Friday, 10am, Rogers 230 Safety, Adaptation and Efficient Learning in Physical Human-Robot Interaction: A Dynamical Systems Approach Nadia Figueroa, University of Pennsylvania Abstract: For the last decades we have lived with the promise of one day being able to own a robot that can coexist, collaborate and cooperate with humans in our everyday lives. This has motivated a vast amount of research on robot control, motion planning, machine learning, perception and physical human-robot interaction (pHRI). However, we are yet to see robots fluidly collaborating with humans and other robots in the human-centric dynamic spaces we inhabit. This deployment bottleneck is due to traditionalist views of how robot tasks and behaviors should be specified and controlled. For collaborative robots to be truly adopted in such dynamic, ever-changing environments they must be adaptive, compliant, reactive, safe and easy to teach or program. Combining these objectives is challenging as providing a single optimal solution can be intractable and even infeasible due to problem complexity, time-critical and safety-critical requirements and contradicting goals. In this talk, I will show that with a Dynamical Systems (DS) approach for motion planning and pHRI we can achieve reactive, provably safe and stable robot behaviors while efficiently teaching the robot complex tasks with a handful of demonstrations. Such an approach can be extended to offer task-level reactivity, transferability and can be used to incrementally learn from new data and failures in a matter of seconds, just as humans do. I will also discuss the role of compliance in collaborative robots, the allowance of soft impacts and the relaxation to the standard definition of safety in pHRI and how this can be achieved with DS-based and optimization-based approaches. Finally, I will talk about the importance of efficient and geometrically rigorous safety boundary representations and present learning-based and sample-based techniques that can achieve real-time safety guarantees in task-space and joint-space for multi-DoF robots interacting with humans. Bio: Nadia Figueroa is the Shalini and Rajeev Misra Presidential Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics Department at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds secondary appointments in Computer and Information Science and Electrical and Systems Engineering and is primary faculty of the GRASP laboratory. She received a B.Sc. degree in Mechatronics from the Monterrey Institute of Technology, Mexico in 2007, an M.Sc. degree in Automation and Robotics from the Technical University of Dortmund, Germany in 2012 and a Ph.D. in Robotics, Control and Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland (EPFL) in 2019. Prior to joining Penn, she was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Interactive Robotics Group of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2020 to 2022. Her research focuses on developing safety, control, estimation and learning methods for collaborative human-aware robotic systems: robots that can safely and efficiently interact with humans and other robots in the human-centric dynamic spaces we inhabit. Her Ph.D thesis was a finalist for the Georges Giralt Ph.D. award in 2020 - the best European Ph.D. thesis in robotics, the ABB PhD Award and the EPFL Doctoral Distinction Award. Her co-authored work on multi-robot human collaboration was a finalist for the KUKA Innovation Award in 2017, Best Systems and Best Conference Paper Award and winner of the Best Student Paper Award at the 2016 Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) Conference.

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Robotics Seminar 2/9: Nadia Figueroa (UPenn)
by Smart, William 06 Feb '24

06 Feb '24

Roboticists, Join us this Friday for a seminar by Nadia Figueroa from UPenn, where she will talk about her work in physical human-robot interaction. Usual time, usual place, usual human-coffee interaction. Friday, 10am, Rogers 230 Safety, Adaptation and Efficient Learning in Physical Human-Robot Interaction: A Dynamical Systems Approach Nadia Figueroa, University of Pennsylvania Abstract: For the last decades we have lived with the promise of one day being able to own a robot that can coexist, collaborate and cooperate with humans in our everyday lives. This has motivated a vast amount of research on robot control, motion planning, machine learning, perception and physical human-robot interaction (pHRI). However, we are yet to see robots fluidly collaborating with humans and other robots in the human-centric dynamic spaces we inhabit. This deployment bottleneck is due to traditionalist views of how robot tasks and behaviors should be specified and controlled. For collaborative robots to be truly adopted in such dynamic, ever-changing environments they must be adaptive, compliant, reactive, safe and easy to teach or program. Combining these objectives is challenging as providing a single optimal solution can be intractable and even infeasible due to problem complexity, time-critical and safety-critical requirements and contradicting goals. In this talk, I will show that with a Dynamical Systems (DS) approach for motion planning and pHRI we can achieve reactive, provably safe and stable robot behaviors while efficiently teaching the robot complex tasks with a handful of demonstrations. Such an approach can be extended to offer task-level reactivity, transferability and can be used to incrementally learn from new data and failures in a matter of seconds, just as humans do. I will also discuss the role of compliance in collaborative robots, the allowance of soft impacts and the relaxation to the standard definition of safety in pHRI and how this can be achieved with DS-based and optimization-based approaches. Finally, I will talk about the importance of efficient and geometrically rigorous safety boundary representations and present learning-based and sample-based techniques that can achieve real-time safety guarantees in task-space and joint-space for multi-DoF robots interacting with humans. Bio: Nadia Figueroa is the Shalini and Rajeev Misra Presidential Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics Department at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds secondary appointments in Computer and Information Science and Electrical and Systems Engineering and is primary faculty of the GRASP laboratory. She received a B.Sc. degree in Mechatronics from the Monterrey Institute of Technology, Mexico in 2007, an M.Sc. degree in Automation and Robotics from the Technical University of Dortmund, Germany in 2012 and a Ph.D. in Robotics, Control and Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland (EPFL) in 2019. Prior to joining Penn, she was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Interactive Robotics Group of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2020 to 2022. Her research focuses on developing safety, control, estimation and learning methods for collaborative human-aware robotic systems: robots that can safely and efficiently interact with humans and other robots in the human-centric dynamic spaces we inhabit. Her Ph.D thesis was a finalist for the Georges Giralt Ph.D. award in 2020 - the best European Ph.D. thesis in robotics, the ABB PhD Award and the EPFL Doctoral Distinction Award. Her co-authored work on multi-robot human collaboration was a finalist for the KUKA Innovation Award in 2017, Best Systems and Best Conference Paper Award and winner of the Best Student Paper Award at the 2016 Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) Conference.

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