Spring 2022 GRASP SFI: Paloma Sodhi, Carnegie Mellon University, “Learning in factor graphs for tactile perception”

Levine 307 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

*This will be a HYBRID Event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and Virtual attendance via Zoom Factor graphs offer a flexible and powerful framework for solving large-scale, nonlinear inference problems as encountered in robot perception. Typically these methods rely on handcrafted models that are efficient to optimize. However, robots often perceive the world through […]

Spring 2022 GRASP SFI: Anthony Bisulco, University of Pennsylvania, “A Tutorial on Neuromorphic Vision for High-Speed Perception”

Levine 307 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

This seminar will be held in person in Levine 307 as well as via Zoom. Mobile robot systems operate in dynamic environments, such as forests, caves, or roadways, where they must perceive and react to incoming stimuli. Each of these environments presents unique challenges such as perception in low-light conditions, high-speed understanding of objects, and […]

MEAM Seminar: “Robot-assisted Imaging of Neuromuscular Function: New Insights on the Neural Substrates of Motor Control”

Glandt Forum, Singh Center for Nanotechnology 3205 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Can we use robots to help humans learn a new motor skill, or to improve performance of a motor task? What are the neural substrates that support motor learning under physical interaction with external agents such as robots? How does repeated exposure to motor training induce plasticity in brain networks? These are fundamental neuroscience questions […]

GRASP on Robotics: Jia Deng, Princeton University, “Toward Dense 3D Reconstruction in the Wild”

Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

This seminar will be held in person in Wu and Chen Auditorium as well as virtually via Zoom. Reconstructing depth and motion of every pixel for arbitrary scenes is a core problem in 3D vision with many downstream applications. In this talk, I will describe some of our recent efforts toward this goal, including various […]

MEAM Seminar: “Agile Maneuver with Under-Actuated Millirobots”

Zoom - Email MEAM for Link peterlit@seas.upenn.edu

Decimeter-scale robots can use a wide range of techniques to maneuver in challenging environments in spite of lacking the actuated degrees of freedom typically seen in larger robots. Agile maneuver for these small robots greatly benefits from a high power-to-weight ratio and mechanical design which can exploit environment interactions, in addition to explicit control strategies. […]

GRASP on Robotics: Jing Xiao, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, “Perception-Action Synergy in Uncertain Environments”

Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Many robotic applications require a robot to operate in an environment with unknowns or uncertainty, at least initially, before it gathers enough information about the environment. In such a case, a robot must rely on sensing and perception to feel its way around. Moreover, it has to couple sensing/perception and motion synergistically in real time, […]

MEAM Seminar: “Exploiting Environmental Fields for Orienteering and Planning Problems”

Zoom - Email MEAM for Link peterlit@seas.upenn.edu

Robots are increasingly being used to complete tasks in complex environments. To complete these tasks, two of the most fundamental choices that the robot must make are (1) task planning: which tasks to complete and in what order, and (2) path planning: what path to take when navigating between those tasks. In this seminar, I […]

Spring 2022 GRASP SFI: Youngwoon Lee, University of Southern California, “Scaling Robot Learning with Skills: Towards Furniture Assembly and Beyond”

Levine 512

Despite the recent progress in robot learning, robotics research and benchmarks today are typically confined to simple short-horizon tasks. However, tasks in our daily lives are much more complicated — consisting of multiple sub-tasks and requiring high dexterity skills — and the typical “learning from scratch” scheme is hardly scale to such complex long-horizon tasks. […]

MEAM Seminar: “Mobile Wireless Infrastructure on Demand in Robot Teams”

Towne 313 220 S. 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

The promise of multi-robot systems is that they can complete tasks quicker and more efficiently than a single robot. However, such performance gains are only realized if robots can communicate with each other and coordinate their actions. As on-board autonomy advances, robots are increasingly being deployed in environments without existing wireless infrastructure and must rely […]

MEAM Seminar: “Modboats: Building an Aquatic Modular Self-Reconfigurable Robotic System out of Underactuated Modules”

Towne 313 220 S. 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Modular robots offer the promise of flexibility; we will be able to deploy teams of generalist modules and reconfigure them into various specialists to perform whatever task is necessary. Surface swimming aquatic modular robots in particular are not well studied, however, because the literature assumes that the modules need to be holonomic, which makes them […]