- Robotics-seminar - Engineering Mailing Lists

No Robotics Seminar This Week - See You April 4th!
by Fitter, Naomi 17 Mar '25

17 Mar '25

Hi all, Just a quick reminder that there is no robotics seminar this week. Don't forget to register for seminar in the spring term, to help us maintain nice, big classroom spaces for the seminar. We'll be back in action with the first seminar of spring term on April 4th. Cheers, Naomi

1 0

Robotics Seminar 3/14: Carina Buzo Tipton (Oregon State OID)
by Fitter, Naomi 13 Mar '25

13 Mar '25

Roboticists, This week, we're having a workshop with Dr. Carina M. Buzo Tipton (an expert on thinking through broader impacts plans for grants proposals/outreach efforts/education and more!) for our Friday seminar. 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 ________________________________________________ Access, Belonging, and Success in Research Carina Buzo Tipton, Assistant Director for DEI Education, OSU OID Abstract: As effective as we can be in our scholarship, research, and classrooms, if there are barriers to access, belonging, and success then our work will be limited. This interactive workshop will introduce key topics and questions for ensuring that the work you are engaged in considers the implications of possible barriers to entry and identifying opportunities for integrating access, belonging, and success into your efforts. Concretely for those engaged in robotics research, this line of thinking will help you articulate the broader impacts of your work, something that many researchers will need to do when writing (for example) proposals for the National Science Foundation and other funding bodies, in addition to supporting the development of useful outreach related to research efforts. For best results, come to the workshop with some type of proposal or research dissemination task in mind (e.g., large robotics research grant, fellowship, SBIR award, outreach effort in development - think about what is helpful to you!) and use the experience to develop ideas for these research efforts. Bio: Dr. Carina M. Buzo Tipton (she/her) is the assistant director for DEI education in the office of institutional diversity. Her published works reach across many topics including institutional DEI curriculum, sexual assault education and consent work, carceral institutional critique, trauma informed pedagogies, Chicanx/Latine gender and sexuality, and student development. Carina’s research and scholarship focus on institutional change, where she argues that if there are critiques of the institution, there must also be solutions, and where there is institutional harm, there must also be healing.

1 1

Robotics Seminar 3/7: Brian Do (Oregon State University)
by Fitter, Naomi 04 Mar '25

04 Mar '25

Hi everyone, Looking forward to this week's seminar! Our speaker for the week is our very own Dr. Brian Do. He'll join us to talk about soft robotics, growing robots, and variable stiffness systems (flyer 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

1 0

Robotics Seminar 2/28: Wendy Ju (Cornell University)
by Fitter, Naomi 27 Feb '25

27 Feb '25

Hi everyone, Looking forward to this week's seminar! Our speaker for the week is Dr. Wendy Ju, who's joining us from Cornell. Her work focuses on design, spanning from thinking about interaction in human-robot scenarios to interactions with cars and even robots and garbage! You won't want to miss it. 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

1 1

Robotics Seminar 2/21: Tom Williams (Colorado School of Mines)
by Fitter, Naomi 20 Feb '25

20 Feb '25

Hi everyone, Looking forward to this week's seminar! Our speaker for the week is Dr. Tom Williams, who's joining us from Colorado School of Mines. His work focuses on natural language-mediated human-robot interaction with consideration of a range of contexts (e.g., environmental, social, moral). It's quite a timely topic alongside the emergence of LLMs/VLMs, and also well aligned with our program's emphasis on robotics and society. 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 P.S. If you'd like to catch Dr. Williams' double-header (seminar, as well as moonlighting as a musical improviser), you can also get tickets to the Saturday night Singu-hilarity<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fapp.arts-…> show<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fapp.arts-…> at the Majestic Theater. The show usually sells out in advance, so it's best to plan ahead! _______________________________________________________________ Title: "Degrees of Freedom: On Robotics and Social Justice" Speaker: Tom Williams, Colorado School of Mines Abstract: Despite recent efforts by the Trump administration to curtail scientific research into diversity and inclusion, social justice issues remain of critical importance to key areas of national interest, including robotics and artificial intelligence. In this talk, Tom Williams will explore critical questions surrounding robotics and social justice, especially the ways that roboticists wield power through the ways they design and deploy their robots. In doing so, Williams will highlight not only the ways roboticists tend to reinforce White and Patriarchal power structures when they make design and deployment decisions, but also how roboticists might instead subvert those power structures by applying theories and methods from a diverse range of fields, including history, sociology, literature, psychology, and philosophy. Ultimately, Williams will connect questions of robot design with larger Abolitionist movements by presenting a vision for an Abolitionist Robotics that calls not just for an end to unjust paradigms of robot design, but moreover for active work toward a more social just future of robotics. Bio: Tom Williams is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Colorado School of Mines, where he directs the Mines Interactive Robotics Research Lab. Prior to joining Mines, Tom earned a joint PhD in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from Tufts University in 2017. Tom’s research focuses on enabling and understanding natural language based human-robot interaction that is sensitive to environmental, cognitive, social, and moral context. His work is funded in part by Early Career grants from NSF, NASA, and the US Air Force. He is the author of the forthcoming book Degrees of Freedom whose central themes will be summarized in this talk.

1 1

Robotics Seminar 2/14: Panel on Robotics Funding and Program Culture
by Fitter, Naomi 14 Feb '25

14 Feb '25

Hi everyone, Looking forward to this week's seminar! Our speakers for this week will be our very own Drs. Julie Adams, Kagan Tumer, and Cindy Grimm with a panel and Q&A related to robotics funding and our program culture. We organized this seminar in part to have a forum for discussing some of the student body's response to Ghost Robotics' visit in the fall, as well as to have an important check-in on program culture elements like being present in student desk areas and lab spaces. 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

1 1

Robotics Seminar 2/7: Ashish Kapoor (Scaled Foundations)
by Fitter, Naomi 06 Feb '25

06 Feb '25

Hi everyone, Looking forward to this week's seminar! Our speaker for the week is Dr. Ashish Kapoor, the CEO and Chief Scientist of Scaled Foundations. He is interested in safe general robot intelligence for applications that benefit society. 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 ____________________________________________________ GRID: A Platform for General Robot Intelligence Development Ashish Kapoor, Ph.D. (Scaled Foundations) Abstract: Developing machine intelligence abilities in robots and autonomous systems is an expensive and time-consuming process. Existing solutions are tailored to specific applications and are harder to generalize. Furthermore, scarcity of training data adds a layer of complexity in deploying deep machine learning models. We present a new platform for General Robot Intelligence Development (GRID) to address both of these issues. The platform enables robots to learn, compose and adapt skills to their physical capabilities, environmental constraints and goals. One of the components of GRID is a state-of-the-art simulation system that models robot physics and the machine intelligence processes. This system in turn is tightly coupled with a multitude of Foundation Models that enables rapid prototyping, design, debugging and refinement of robot AI models. GRID is designed from the ground up to be extensible to accommodate new types of robots, vehicles, hardware platforms and software protocols. In addition, the modular design enables various deep ML components and existing foundation models to be easily usable in a wider variety of robot-centric problems. We demonstrate the platform in various heterogeneous robotics scenarios and demonstrate how the platform dramatically accelerates development of machine intelligent robots. Bio: Ashish Kapoor is the CEO and Chief Scientist for Scaled Foundations. Ashish’s focus for the last decade has been to lower the barrier to entry in Robotics by building Safe General Robot Intelligence for applications that positively influence the society. Ashish formerly founded and led Autonomous Systems and Robotics Research at Microsoft Research, where he co-invented AirSim and pioneered use of near-realistic simulation for robotics. Ashish has a PhD from the MIT Media Laboratory and a Bachelor of Technology from Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.

1 1

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.

1 0

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

1 0

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.

1 1