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• Feb

  9

  MS in Robotics Seminar: Aaron Johnson

  Master of Science in Robotics

  10:00 AM ITW Classroom Ford Motor Company Engineering Design Center

  EVENT DETAILS

  Title:
  Designing a Robot's Interaction with the Environment

  Abstract:
  A robot's behavior is the resulting interaction between that robot and the environment. However real world environments, like our homes and offices, are cluttered, complex, and changing dynamically. Here, the environment can not be directly controlled and the full state of the environment will never be know. Therefore the robot's behavior may only be controlled indirectly through the design of the robot's systems: the hardware platform, software controllers, and sensor feedback. This talk will present new models of the mechanics of a robot's interaction with the environment and study structural properties of those models gain design insight into the robot's systems. In particular, divergence metrics over the robot's dynamics are identified to measure how uncertainty in the system will evolve over time. These metrics are then used in planning the robot's controllers so that the resulting interaction with the environment is more robust to uncertainty. These ideas are applied to both a home-assistance manipulation robot and an outdoor rough terrain legged robot.

  Bio:
  Aaron M. Johnson is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests include novel robot design - behavior design, controller design, and platform design - as well as dynamic transitions, physics-based planning, bio-inspired robotics, actuator modeling, and robot ethics. Dr. Johnson received his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania in 2014, and his B.S. degree from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in 2008. He was formerly a Visiting Researcher with Boston Dynamics, Electrical Engineering Intern at iRobot, and a Research Assistant with the Biorobotics Lab at Carnegie Mellon University. He was a Best Student Paper Finalist at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in 2013, as well as at the Climbing and Walking Robots Conference in 2012.

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  TIME Tuesday, February 9, 2016 at 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

  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)