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• Dec

  1

  MS in Robotics Seminar: Amy LaViers

  Master of Science in Robotics

  2:00 PM ITW Classroom Ford Motor Company Engineering Design Center

  EVENT DETAILS

  Title:

  Choreographic Abstractions for Embodied Design of Heterogeneous Robotic Behavior

  Abstract:

  How do you get a robot to do the disco? Or perform a cheerleading routine? These acts require a quantitative understanding of two distinct movement behaviors and pose new problems for the high-level control of robots. The ability to easily create and control movement programs tailored to a specific task or context by untrained operators is key to bringing robots out of specialized roles for high volume manufacturing processes and into more rapidly changing scenarios,working alongside human operators. Thus, abstractions for robotic control need to align with the embodied experience of human movement. This talk will discuss the use of Laban/Bartenieff Movement Studies (LBMS), a framework and taxonomy for movement, as a formal, embodied inroad to this experience and to facilitate the production of diverse robotic behaviors. In this talk, a `behavior' will be defined by a set of movement primitives that are scaled and sequenced differently in different instances. Methods for scaling and sequencing of movement primitives using optimal control and linear temporal logic (LTL) and for extracting primitives automatically from human movement using inverse optimal control will be discussed. These methods will be applied to real robotic platforms and presented in a context that motivates the fundamental value of high-level abstractions that allow for embodied design of a wide array of robotic behavior.

  Bio:

  Amy LaViers is an Assistant Professor in Mechanical Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and director of the Robotics,Automation, and Dance (RAD) Lab where she develops robotic algorithms inspired by movement and dance theory. As a faculty member she has worked in the area of advanced manufacturing through an industry-university consortium, the Commonwealth Center for Advanced Manufacturing (CCAM), and forged interdisciplinary ties with the UVA Dance Program and the Laban/Bartenieff Institute for Movement Studies, where she is pursuing a Certification in Movement Analysis (CMA). Prior to UIUC she held a position as an Assistant Professor for two years in Systems and Information Engineering at the University of Virginia. She completed her Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech where she was the recipient of the ECE Graduate Teaching Excellence Award and a finalist for the CETL/BP Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award. Her dissertation included a live performance exploring the concepts of style she developed there. Her research began at Princeton University where she earned a certificate in Dance and a degree in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. Her senior thesis, which quantitatively compared two styles of dance, earned top honors in the MAE department, the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and the Lewis Center for the Arts.

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  TIME Tuesday, December 1, 2015 at 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

  LOCATION ITW Classroom Ford Motor Company Engineering Design Center    map it

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  CONTACT Jarvis Schultz    jschultz@northwestern.edu EMAIL

  CALENDAR Master of Science in Robotics

• May

  3

  Russ Tedrake, MIT and Toyota Research Institute, "Dexterous Manipulation with Diffusion Policies"

  Center for Robotics and Biosystems (CRB)

  11:30 AM M416, Technological Institute

  EVENT DETAILSmore info

  

  Speaker: Russ Tedrake, Toyota Professor of EECS, Aero/Astro, ME at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and VP of Research at Toyota Research Institute

  Title: Dexterous Manipulation with Diffusion Policies

  Date and Time: Friday, May 3 at 11:30 AM CT

  Location: Tech ESAM M416 and Zoom

  Zoom Link: https://tinyurl.com/CRBSeminar

  • NU-authenticated attendees will be automatically admitted. Others, please email amy.nedoss@northwestern.edu to be admitted from the waiting room.

  Abstract:

  At the Toyota Research Institute (TRI), we've been working on behavior cloning for dexterous manipulation. Building on the Diffusion Policy framework that we've recently developed in collaboration with Shuran Song, we now have a very solid pipeline for taking ~50-100 bimanual haptic teleop demonstrations and turning that into a surprisingly effective visuomotor (+tactile) policy. Because there is no explicit state representation required, these skills work equally well manipulating deformable, liquid, or other difficult to model tasks as they do for more traditional rigid-object manipulation. We're actively scaling this up into the multi-task setting and now see a plausible path towards "Large Behavior Models". This behavior cloning pipeline is working incredibly well, and must be understood deeply in the broader context of output-feedback control. Time permitting, I'll also tell you a bit about some new results in optimization-based planning and control, and where they might fit in the age of foundation models.

  Bio:

  Russ Tedrake is the Toyota Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, and Aero/Astro, and he is a member of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL). He is also the Vice President of Robotics Research at Toyota Research Institute (TRI). He received a B.S.E. in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan in 1999, and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2004. Dr. Tedrake is the Director of the MIT CSAIL Center for Robotics and was the leader of MIT’s entry in the DARPA Robotics Challenge. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the MIT Jerome Saltzer Award for undergraduate teaching, the DARPA Young Faculty Award in Mathematics, the 2012 Ruth and Joel Spira Teaching Award, and was named a Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellow. His research has been recognized with numerous conference best paper awards, including ICRA, Robotics: Science and Systems, Humanoids, Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control, as well as the inaugural best paper award from the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Whole-Body Control.

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  TIME Friday, May 3, 2024 at 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM

  LOCATION M416, Technological Institute    map it

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  CONTACT Amy Nedoss    amy.nedoss@northwestern.edu EMAIL

  CALENDAR Center for Robotics and Biosystems (CRB)