Please join us for a talk by faculty candidate Chao Liu, a Post Doc Associate from MIT
Tuesday January 23, 2024 at 12:30pm in ITE 336
And via webex
https://uconn-cmr.webex.com/uconn-cmr/j.php?MTID=m7284a9e3146fe844633f0d5c7e2c9f81
Title: Flexible Robots through Compliance, Collaboration, and Redundancy
Abstract:
Robots are widely used in controlled and predictable environments, such as factories, but their potential in more dynamic and unstructured domains remains largely untapped. To enable robots to assist people in various real-world scenarios, such as disaster relief, domestic assistance, and human-robot collaboration, they need to be more flexible, capable of navigating and responding to the complex and uncertain nature of these situations. My research aims to advance robot adaptability through three key aspects: compliance, collaboration, and redundancy. In this talk, I will present our motivation and our efforts to develop flexible robotic systems in various forms that can help people pervasively through multimodal perception. The versatility of these systems relies on innovative designs and algorithms. In particular, I will demonstrate how to combine soft materials and rigid elements to create compliant and dexterous robots and how to model contact dynamics to improve robotic manipulation and grasping, how to enable agile and physical collaborations among robots to enhance collective intelligence, and how to exploit kinematic redundancy to achieve adaptive behaviors.
Bio:
Chao Liu is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT, hosted by Daniela Rus. Before this, Liu completed his Ph.D. advised by Mark Yim at the ModLab, a part of the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing & Perception
(GRASP) Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on bio-inspired robots, swarm and modular robots, parallel robots, robotic control and motion planning, and grasping and manipulation through multimodal sensing. His work includes the hardware design of several robotic platforms, novel perception solutions, and efficient algorithms on motion planning and control. He was the finalist for the Best Paper Award on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics in Memory of Motohiro Kisoi at IROS 2019.
For more information, contact: Brandy Ciraldo at brandy.ciraldo@uconn.edu