[talks] Talk on robotics by Siddhartha Srinivasa today at 4:30 in ELE

[Thomas Funkhouser]

Title: *Robotic Manipulation under clutter and uncertainty with and 
around people*
Speaker: Siddhartha Srinivasa, Carnegie Mellon University
Series: EE Departmental Seminars
Location: E-Quad, B205
Date/Time: Thursday, February 16, 2017 - 4:30pm

Abstract:
Robots manipulate with super-human speed and dexterity on factory 
floors. But yet they fail even under moderate amounts of clutter or 
uncertainty. However, human teleoperators perform remarkable acts of 
manipulation with the same hardware. My research goal is to bridge the 
gap between what robotic manipulators can do now and what they are 
capable of doing.

What human operators intuitively possess that robots lack are models of 
interaction between the manipulator and the world that go beyond 
pick-and-place. I will describe our work on nonprehensile physics-based 
manipulation that has produced simple but effective models, integrated 
with proprioception and perception, that has enabled robots to 
fearlessly push, pull, and slide objects, and reconfigure clutter that 
comes in the way of their primary task.

But human environments are also filled with humans. Collaborative 
manipulation is a dance, demanding the sharing of intentions, 
inferences, and forces between the robot and the human. I will also 
describe our work on the mathematics of human-robot interaction that has 
produced a framework for collaboration using Bayesian inference to model 
the human collaborator, and trajectory optimization to generate fluent 
collaborative plans.
Finally, I will talk about our new initiative on assistive care that 
focuses on marrying physics, human-robot collaboration, control theory, 
and rehabilitation engineering to build and deploy caregiving systems.


Bio:
Siddhartha Srinivasa is the Finmeccanica Associate Professor at The 
Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He works on robotic 
manipulation, with the goal of enabling robots to perform complex 
manipulation tasks under uncertainty and clutter, with and around 
people. To this end, he founded and directs the Personal Robotics Lab, 
and co-directs the Manipulation Lab. He has been a PI on the Quality of 
Life Technologies NSF ERC, DARPA ARM-S and the CMU CHIMP team on the 
DARPA DRC. Sidd is also passionate about building end-to-end systems 
(HERB, ADA, HRP3, CHIMP, Andy, among others) that integrate perception, 
planning, and control in the real world. Understanding the interplay 
between system components has helped produce state of the art algorithms 
for object recognition and pose estimation (MOPED), and dense 3D 
modeling (CHISEL, now used by Google Project Tango).

Sidd received a B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian 
Institute of Technology Madras in 1999, an MS in 2001 and a PhD in 2005 
from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He played 
badminton and tennis for IIT Madras, captained the CMU squash team, and 
lately runs competitively.

http://ee.princeton.edu/events/robotic-manipulation-under-clutter-and-uncertainty-and-around-people

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