- Robotics-seminar - Engineering Mailing Lists

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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No Robotics Seminar this week
by Smart, William 31 Jan '24

31 Jan '24

Roboticists, Title says it all. No seminar this week. Join us next week for a talk by Nadia Figueroa from UPenn, and then again the following week for a talk by Devin Roach from OSU. -- Bill

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Robotics Seminar 1/26: Sonia Chernova (GaTech)
by Smart, William 25 Jan '24

25 Jan '24

Roboticists, Just a reminder about the robotics seminar tomorrow, with Sonia Chernova from Georgia Tech. Details as usual: 10am, Rogers 230, coffee and cake. cheers -- Bill Autonomy in the Human World: Developing Robots that Handle the Diversity of Human Lives Sonia Chernova (Georgia Institute of Technology) Abstract: Reliable operation in everyday human environments – homes, offices, and businesses – remains elusive for today’s robotic systems. A key challenge is diversity, as no two homes or businesses are exactly alike. However, despite the innumerable unique aspects of any home, there are many commonalities as well, particularly about how objects are placed and used. These commonalities can be captured in semantic representations, and then used to improve the autonomy of robotic systems by, for example, enabling robots to infer missing information in human instructions, efficiently search for objects, or manipulate objects more effectively. In this talk, I will discuss recent advances in semantic reasoning, particularly focusing on semantics of everyday objects, household environments, and the development of robotic systems that intelligently interact with their world. Bio: Sonia Chernova is an Associate Professor in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. She directs the Robot Autonomy and Interactive Learning lab, where her research focuses on the development of intelligent and interactive autonomous systems. Chernova’s contributions span robotics and artificial intelligence, including semantic reasoning, adaptive autonomy, human-robot interaction, and explainable AI. She also leads the NSF AI Institute for Collaborative Assistance and Responsive Interaction for Networked Groups (AI-CARING), whose mission is to develop collaborative AI partners-in-care that help support a growing population of older adults, helping them sustain independence, improve quality of life, and increase effectiveness of care coordination across their care network.

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Re: [Robotics-seminar] Robotics Seminar 1/26: Sonia Chernova (GaTech)
by Smart, William 22 Jan '24

22 Jan '24

[this time with the correct name in the header] Roboticists, Join us for the next Robotics Seminar this week, where Prof. Sonia Chernova from Georgia Tech will be talking about her work in the area of real-world autonomy. There will be real coffee and real cake, as usual. 10am, Rogers 230, Friday 1/26. cheers -- Bill Autonomy in the Human World: Developing Robots that Handle the Diversity of Human Lives Sonia Chernova (Georgia Institute of Technology) Abstract: Reliable operation in everyday human environments – homes, offices, and businesses – remains elusive for today’s robotic systems. A key challenge is diversity, as no two homes or businesses are exactly alike. However, despite the innumerable unique aspects of any home, there are many commonalities as well, particularly about how objects are placed and used. These commonalities can be captured in semantic representations, and then used to improve the autonomy of robotic systems by, for example, enabling robots to infer missing information in human instructions, efficiently search for objects, or manipulate objects more effectively. In this talk, I will discuss recent advances in semantic reasoning, particularly focusing on semantics of everyday objects, household environments, and the development of robotic systems that intelligently interact with their world. Bio: Sonia Chernova is an Associate Professor in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. She directs the Robot Autonomy and Interactive Learning lab, where her research focuses on the development of intelligent and interactive autonomous systems. Chernova’s contributions span robotics and artificial intelligence, including semantic reasoning, adaptive autonomy, human-robot interaction, and explainable AI. She also leads the NSF AI Institute for Collaborative Assistance and Responsive Interaction for Networked Groups (AI-CARING), whose mission is to develop collaborative AI partners-in-care that help support a growing population of older adults, helping them sustain independence, improve quality of life, and increase effectiveness of care coordination across their care network.

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Robotics Seminar 1/26: Sonie Chernova (GaTech)
by Smart, William 22 Jan '24

22 Jan '24

Roboticists, Join us for the next Robotics Seminar this week, where Prof. Sonia Chernova from Georgia Tech will be talking about her work in the area of real-world autonomy. There will be real coffee and real cake, as usual. 10am, Rogers 230, Friday 1/26. cheers -- Bill Autonomy in the Human World: Developing Robots that Handle the Diversity of Human Lives Sonia Chernova (Georgia Institute of Technology) Abstract: Reliable operation in everyday human environments – homes, offices, and businesses – remains elusive for today’s robotic systems. A key challenge is diversity, as no two homes or businesses are exactly alike. However, despite the innumerable unique aspects of any home, there are many commonalities as well, particularly about how objects are placed and used. These commonalities can be captured in semantic representations, and then used to improve the autonomy of robotic systems by, for example, enabling robots to infer missing information in human instructions, efficiently search for objects, or manipulate objects more effectively. In this talk, I will discuss recent advances in semantic reasoning, particularly focusing on semantics of everyday objects, household environments, and the development of robotic systems that intelligently interact with their world. Bio: Sonia Chernova is an Associate Professor in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. She directs the Robot Autonomy and Interactive Learning lab, where her research focuses on the development of intelligent and interactive autonomous systems. Chernova’s contributions span robotics and artificial intelligence, including semantic reasoning, adaptive autonomy, human-robot interaction, and explainable AI. She also leads the NSF AI Institute for Collaborative Assistance and Responsive Interaction for Networked Groups (AI-CARING), whose mission is to develop collaborative AI partners-in-care that help support a growing population of older adults, helping them sustain independence, improve quality of life, and increase effectiveness of care coordination across their care network.

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Nils Wilde seminar delayed to Wednesday Jan 17 1pm-2pm Rogers 226 (student meeting afterwards)
by Hollinger, Geoffrey 18 Jan '24

18 Jan '24

Hi All, Due to the icy conditions, Nils Wilde’s seminar will be delayed one day until Wednesday Jan 17. The updated information is below: Dr. Nils Wilde will be presenting his work on Preference Learning and Multi-Objective Planning for Autonomous Systems on Wednesday (Jan 17th) at 1:00 - 2:00 pm in Rogers 226 and via Zoom. Afterward, from 2:15-3:00 pm, there will be a student-postdoc Q&A session with Dr. Wilde in Rogers 226 (note updated location of Rogers 226). See below for Dr. Wilde's abstract and bio. Hope that you can make it! Geoff --- Oregon State University, College of Engineering Collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Systems (CoRIS) Institute<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fengineeri…> Research Associate Candidate Seminar Date: Tuesday, January 16, 2024 Time: 1 pm Pacific Time In-person location: Rogers 226 Zoom link: https://oregonstate.zoom.us/j/95307742594?pwd=cWdmUS91dU9VeDQ0SnVZMWJMcFhtZ…<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Foregonsta…> Seminar Title: Preference Learning and Multi-Objective Planning for Autonomous Systems Speaker: Dr. Nils Wilde, https://sites.google.com/view/nwilde/home<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsites.goo…> Seminar information provided by the speaker: Abstract: The deployment of autonomous robots in real-world settings often requires planning and decision making under multiple competing objectives. Which trade-off between objectives is the most adequate often depends on the respective end-user. Thus, a central problem is how inexperienced users can adapt autonomous systems to their preferences. In this talk we focus on two parts of the problem. First, we study human-in-the-loop learning frameworks that allow users to customize robot behaviour to their preferences through a sequence of simple interactions. One such interaction mode is choice feedback where users choose between two presented options, allowing for effectively learning user preference within few iterations. In the second part, we study the challenge of exploring optimal trade-offs for multi-objective robot planning problems. We establish fundamental theoretical properties that allow for efficient algorithm design. Applications of the presented work include high-level motion planning in human-centered environments, manipulation in servicing tasks, environmental monitoring, vehicle routing, and multi-robot pickup and delivery. Speaker Bio: Nils Wilde is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Autonomous Multi-Robots Lab at TU Delft, working with Javier Alonso-Mora. Until 2021 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Autonomous Systems Lab at the University of Waterloo where he also did his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering under the co-supervision of Dana Kulić and Stephen L. Smith from 2016 to 2020. Before that he completed his BSc. and MSc. degrees at the Technical University Berlin in 2012 and 2016, respectively. Nils' research combines robot motion planning, multi-robot coordination, and human-robot interaction (HRI), developing algorithmic frameworks on the intersection of control, learning and optimization. -- Geoffrey A. Hollinger Associate Professor, Robotics & Mechanical Engineering College of Engineering Oregon State University https://research.engr.oregonstate.edu/rdml/home<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fresearch.…> https://engineering.oregonstate.edu/CoRIS<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fengineeri…>

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