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MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “From Deployments of Elder Care Service Robots to the Design of Affordable Low-Complexity End-Effectors and Novel Manipulation Techniques”

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

Older adults are forming a much larger percentage of the population leading to a strain in the healthcare sector. It is expected that the population aged 65 and over in the United States alone will double in the next 30 years, and similarly worldwide. Despite the abundance of facilities to accommodate the growing older adult […]

MEAM PhD Thesis Defense: “Modular Robots Morphology Transformation and Task Execution”

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

Self-reconfigurable modular robots are composed of a small set of modules with uniform docking interfaces. Different from conventional robots that are custom-built and optimized for specific tasks, modular robots are able to adapt to many different activities, and handle hardware and software failures by rearranging their components. This reconfiguration capability allows these systems to exist […]

MEAM PhD Thesis Defense: “Design of Proprioceptive Legged Robots”

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

It has been twenty years since the advent of the first power-autonomous legged robots, yet they have still not yet been deployed at scale. One fundamental challenge in legged machines is that actuators must perform work at relatively high speed in swing but also at high torque in stance. Legged machines must also be able […]

Fall 2021 GRASP Seminar: GRASP Research Overview – Day 1

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

GRASP Lab Faculty confirmed presentations (where appropriate their presenters)… Mark Yim – Welcome & Introduction Pratik Chaudhari Kostas Daniilidis (presented by Kenneth Chaney) Eric Eaton Dinesh Jayaraman Dr. Vijay Kumar (presented by Steven Chen) Marc Miskin Michael Posa (presented by Matt Halm) CJ Taylor

Fall 2021 GRASP Seminar: GRASP Research Overview – Day 2

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

GRASP Lab faculty confirmed presentations (where appropriate their presenters)… Dr. Ani Hsieh – Welcome & Introduction Dr. Michelle Johnson (presented by Frances Sowande) Dr. Dan Koditschek (presented by Wei-Hsi Chen) Dr. George Pappas (presented by Yiannis Kantaros) Dr. Rahul Mangharam Dr. Nikolai Matni Dr. Robert Stuart-Smith Dr. Cynthia Sung Dr. James Pikul

GRASP on Robotics: “Motion Planning for Autonomy: Successes and Challenges Ahead”

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

The past two decades have witnessed incredible advances towards the design of autonomous systems. This talk will discuss the role of motion planning in yielding solutions for an agent that is able to execute a variety of tasks in a variety of settings. Problem decomposition has been and remains a difficult task, and motion planning […]

GRASP on Robotics: “The Importance of Pneumatic Actuation in Adaptive Robotic Devices”

Abstract: Soft pneumatic actuators have become a popular implement in modern robotic systems due to their intrinsic mechanical compliance, which affords researchers levels of robustness and adaptability that can be difficult to achieve in rigid-body, motor-driven devices. However, with the physical advantages of these versatile actuators come significant challenges in sensing, feedback control, and sustainable, […]

MEAM Seminar: “Robotics Goes Soft: Challenges and Achievements, for New Robotics Scenarios”

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

Largely inspired by the observation of the role of soft tissues in living organisms, the use of soft materials for building robots is recognized as one of the current challenges for pushing the boundaries of robotics technologies and building robotic systems for service tasks in natural environments. The study of living organisms sheds light on […]

Fall 2021 GRASP SFI: “Physics-inspired learning for discontinuous contact dynamics”

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 here… Frictional contact is the core underlying behavior of robot locomotion and manipulation, and its nearly-discontinuous dynamics make planning and control challenging even when an accurate model of the robot is available. In this talk, I will first […]

GRASP on Robotics: “Planning on Graphs of Convex Sets”

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

*This will be a HYBRID Event with in-person attendance in Wu & Chen Auditorium and Virtual attendance via Zoom Webinar here.  Motivated by the challenging problems in planning and control through contact, our group has been working to connect more deeply the motion planning formulations we often use in robotics with a different lineage of […]