January 2025 - Robotics-seminar - Engineering Mailing Lists

Robotics Seminar 1/31: Joydeep Biswas (UT Austin)
by Fitter, Naomi 27 Jan '25

27 Jan '25

Hi everyone, Looking forward to this week's seminar! Our speaker for the week is Dr. Joydeep Biswas, an expert in perception, planning, and control as applied to autonomous mobile robots working in human environments. He's visiting us from UT Austin. As a reminder, everyone is expected to come to the seminar. We’ve got a strict no-device policy. We also have, as always, coffee and coffee cake. For the winter term, we're in Rogers Hall 230. Seminar is at 10am Friday. See you then! Cheers, Naomi ____________________________________________________ Teaching Robots To "Get It Right" Dr. Joydeep Biswas, UT Austin Abstract: We are interested in building and deploying service mobile robots to assist with arbitrary end-user tasks in everyday environments. In such open-world settings, how can we ensure that robots 1) perceive relevant factors to successfully operate in the world in ways consistent with social and other unwritten norms; and 2) correctly complete the tasks expected of them? How can we teach robots to "get it right" without having to enumerate all relevant entities, norms, and specifications of interest for it? In this talk, I will survey these technical challenges, and present several promising directions to address them. To "get it right", robots will have to reason about unexpected sources of failures in the real world and learn to overcome them; glean appropriate contextual information from perception to understand how to operate in the world; and reason about what correct task execution actually entails. Bio: Joydeep Biswas is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin, and Visiting Professor at Nvidia. He earned his B.Tech in Engineering Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 2008, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2010 and 2014 respectively. From 2015 to 2019, he was an assistant professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research spans perception and planning for long-term autonomy, with the ultimate goal of having service mobile robots deployed in human environments for years at a time, without the need for expert corrections or supervision. Prof. Biswas received the NSF CAREER award in 2021, an Amazon Research Award in 2018 and 2024, and a JP Morgan Faculty Research Award in 2018 and 2024.

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Robotics Seminar 1/24: Dylan Wood (University of Oregon)
by Fitter, Naomi 22 Jan '25

22 Jan '25

Roboticists, Looking forward to this week's seminar! Our speaker for the week is Dr. Dylan Wood, an expert in material integration with computational design and advanced manufacturing. (Flyer with more bio and abstract information attached.) As a reminder, everyone is expected to come to the seminar. We’ve got a strict no-device policy. We also have, as always, coffee and coffee cake. For the winter term, we're in Rogers Hall 230. Seminar is at 10am Friday. See you then! Cheers, Naomi

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Robotics Seminars 1/17: Imraan Faruque (Oklahoma State University) and Dance2 (PRAx Visitor)
by Fitter, Naomi 16 Jan '25

16 Jan '25

Roboticists, Looking forward to another exciting week of seminar! We have an action-packed week, with one main speaker and one bonus visitor this Friday. Our main speaker this week will be Dr. Imraan Faruque, an expert in biologically-inspired flight dynamics and control of unmanned systems. We will also have the folks behind Dance2<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fprax.oreg…>, a modern dance piece involving human-robot collaboration (based on research at the University of Maryland) visiting Friday. As a reminder, everyone is expected to come to the main seminar. Please attend the bonus seminar as well, if you're interested and able! We’ve got a strict no-device policy. We also have, as always, coffee and coffee cake. For the fall term, we're back to Rogers Hall 230. The main seminar is at 10am Friday, and the bonus seminar is at 11:30am Friday, both in Rogers 230. See you then! Cheers, Naomi MAIN SEMINAR (10am Friday, Rogers 230) Multi-agent control architectures in aerospace: from flying insect swarms to orbital debris cleanup Imraan A. Faruque (Oklahoma State University) Additional abstract and bio information attached. BONUS SEMINAR (11:30am Friday, Rogers 230) Gear Up - The Many Iterations of One Tiny Robot Description: DANCE2 robotics engineer and UMD graduate student, Jiasheng Li, will discuss the evolution of the Calico robot. Members of the DANCE2 creative team will join him to demo how the robot is used in the performance and how the unique needs of the creative process drove the engineering process.

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Robotics Seminar 1/10: Matthew Gombolay (Georgia Tech)
by Fitter, Naomi 07 Jan '25

07 Jan '25

Roboticists, Welcome back! Hope everyone had a nice winter break. We're jumping back into seminar this term with an exciting external speaker right away. Our speaker this week will be Dr. Matthew Gombolay, and expert in robotics and AI who thinks a lot about human-robot interaction and safe/explainable systems. As a reminder, everyone is expected to come to the seminar. We’ve got a strict no-device policy. We also have, as always, coffee and coffee cake. For the fall term, we're back to Rogers Hall - we'll be meeting in Rogers 230, with the usual timing of 10am Fridays. Please plan to head there each Friday at 10am. See you then! Cheers, Naomi Value Alignment and Safety via Interactive and Explainable Human-Robot Learning Matthew Gombolay, Georgia Tech Abstract: Value alignment and safety in generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) are key problems receiving intense focus writ large due to the emergent success of large models in many intelligence benchmarks. The threat of misaligned models becomes even more stark as we look to embody agents physically for human-robot interaction. In this talk, I will present human-centered approaches to address these critical challenges in generative AI through interactive and explainable robot learning. First, I will define challenges for safety and alignment in AI/Robotics and show that addressing the problem is more difficult than it appears at first glance. Second, I will share our recent advances to align and verify the properties of learned robot behavior through interactive machine learning and explainable artificial intelligence. Finally, I will present a roadmap for future work to bring together critical stakeholders for transdisciplinary research for beneficent AI. Bio: Dr. Matthew Gombolay is an Associate Professor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He was named the Anne and Alan Taetle Early-career Assistant Professor in 2018. He received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 2011, an S.M. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT in 2013, and a Ph.D. in Autonomous Systems from MIT in 2017. Between defending his dissertation and joining the faculty at Georgia Tech, Dr. Gombolay served as technical staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, transitioning his research to the U.S. Navy and earning an R&D 100 Award. His publication record includes best paper awards and nominations from the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics, the ACM/IEEE Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, the Conference on Robot Learning, and Robotics: Science and Systems. Dr. Gombolay was selected as a DARPA Riser and received the Early Career Award from the National Fire Control Symposium, a NASA Early Career Fellowship, and the NSF CAREER award.

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