Hosted by Guy Hoffman
10/31/17
We will present lightning talks of human-robot-interaction themed papers that have been submitted this year to conferences such as HRI, CHI, and AAAI. Talks will be max 5 minutes and preferably presented by the student author.
Fernando Tubilla
11/7/17
Every day, Amazon picks, packs, and ships millions of customer orders from a network of fulfillment centers (FCs) spread all over the globe. With each FC holding millions of inventory items, most customer orders requiring a unique combination of several of these items, and many orders needing to be shipped within a few hours of being placed, cutting-edge advances in technology are needed to ensure that orders are fulfilled efficiently and shipped on time. In this talk, we will present Amazon’s mobile robotic fulfillment solution, consisting of a fleet of thousands of drive units per FC that deliver inventory shelves to picking associates. We will describe the solution’s key advantages and its main components, and provide an overview of the complex resource allocation and planning problems addressed by its sophisticated algorithms. We will also discuss the Amazon Robotics Challenge for advancing the state of the art in item manipulation and grasping, as well as a couple of big open problems in robotic warehousing.
Kevin O’Brien
11/14/17
In this talk I will present an Elastomeric Passive Transmission (EPT) which increases the maximum output force and actuation speed of tendon-driven actuators. The EPT achieves these improvements with minimal impact to the size, weight, or cost of the system. Using inherent tendon tension to strain elastomeric struts toward the center of the motor-mounted spool, the EPT passively adjusts the effective gearing ratio of a motor. This allows a tendon-driven actuator to move with high speed when unimpeded, and with high-force under load. Our EPTs can be used with low-cost motors to achieve the performance (maximum force and speed) of a high-cost motor at a drastically reduced cost, or they can further improve the performance of higher quality, more expensive motors. To demonstrate the utility of these EPTs, we have integrated them into a prosthetic hand which meets, and in some cases exceeds, the performance of a high-end commercial prosthetic with motors that are 10% the cost. Our prosthetic hand has 6 active degrees of freedom which drive 5 3D-printed, soft digits (one for the flexion of each finger, and two for the thumb). Each finger can fully close in < .6 seconds and can grasp with a maximum force of ~40N. The entire hand has a mass of ~400 grams and a material cost of < $500.
Kirstin Peterson
11/21/17
I will discuss ongoing (and future) work related to a new project undertaken in the CEI-lab. This involves integration of honey bees into Bio-Cyber Physical Systems. Social insects are capable of robust sustained operation in unpredictable environments far beyond what is possible with state-of-the-art artificial systems. Honey bees are the premiere agricultural pollinator bringing in over $150 billion annually. A colony causes pollination by dispatching tens of thousands of scouts and foragers to survey and sample kilometer-wide areas around their hive. Thus, the colony as a whole accumulates vast information about the local agricultural landscape, bloom and dearth — information that would be very informative if available to farmers and beekeepers.
Mike Duffy
11/28/17
The first aerospace revolution started in 1903 with the Wright brothers successful sustained powered flight, opening up the skies for manned flight. The second aerospace revolution came in the early 1950’s with the first commercial jet airliner, the de Havilland Comet, which made affordable air transportation available to the masses. The third aerospace revolution takes the pilot and fossil fuels out of the aircraft to drastically improve cost, safety, reduce noise and improve the user experience to enable a new way of moving through the sky.The size and cost of sensors and electronics have come down so significantly, primarily due to the smart phone industries mass production of products; additionally, electric motors, controllers and batteries have become more power and energy dense due to automotive and electronics industries, that today, drones and personal aircraft have become technically and economically feasible for the masses. This talk will attempt to show the trends that are making personal air travel possible in the next 5-10 years and how Robotics and Electric Propulsion will be the enablers.
Ross Knepper
1/25/17
The robotics seminar series will be kicked off this semester with a community discussion about the seminar and how it can best fulfill the needs of the community, i.e. build more connections among labs and departments, educate researchers about tools and techniques, and better inform interested parties about the latest and greatest research.
Will Thomason
2/8/17
The Robotic Personal Assistants Lab (RPAL) under PI Prof. Knepper investigates technologies to make robots behave as peers in collaborative tasks with people. In this seminar, several members of the lab will give informal chalk talks to describe their current research. These talks are meant to be interactive and accessible to a robotics audience. Rather than polished talks, these are snapshots of works in progress. We hope that this session will serve as a template for other labs at Cornell to emulate.
Chris Mavrogiannis
2/15/17
The Robotic Personal Assistants Lab (RPAL) under PI Prof. Knepper investigates technologies to make robots behave as peers in collaborative tasks with people. In this seminar, several members of the lab will give informal chalk talks to describe their current research. These talks are meant to be interactive and accessible to a robotics audience. Rather than polished talks, these are snapshots of works in progress. We hope that this session will serve as a template for other labs at Cornell to emulate.
2/22/17
obot swarms promise to offer solutions for applications that today are considered dangerous, expensive, or even impossible. Notable examples include construction, space exploration, mining, ocean restoration, nanomedicine, disaster response, and humanitarian demining. The diverse and large-scale nature of these applications requires the coordination of numerous robots, likely in the order of hundreds or thousands, with heterogeneous capabilities. Swarm engineering is an emerging research field that studies how to model, design, develop, and verify swarm systems. In this talk, I will discuss the aspects of swarm engineering that intersect with classical computer science. In particular, focusing on the concept of robot swarms as a “programmable machine”, I will analyze the issues that arise when one wants to write programs for swarms. After presenting Buzz, a programming language for swarms on which I worked during my postdoc, I will outline a number of open problems on which I intend to work over the next years.
Bio: Carlo Pinciroli is assistant professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where he leads the NEST Lab. His research interests include swarm robotics and software engineering. Prof. Pinciroli obtained a Master’s degree in Computer Engineering at Politecnico di Milano, Italy and a Master’s degree in Computer Science at University of Illinois at Chicago, in 2005. He then worked for one year in several projects for Barclays Bank PLC group. In 2006 he joined the IRIDIA laboratory at Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium, under the supervision of Prof. Marco Dorigo. While at IRIDIA, he obtained a Diplôme d’études approfondies in 2007 and a PhD in applied sciences in 2014, and he completed a 8-month post-doctoral period. Between 2015 and 2016, Prof. Pinciroli was a postdoctoral researcher at MIST, École Polytechnique de Montréal in Canada under the supervision of Prof. Giovanni Beltrame. Prof. Pinciroli published 49 peer-reviewed articles and 2 book chapters, and edited 1 book. In 2015, F.R.S.-FNRS awarded him the most prestigious postdoctoral scholarship in Belgium (Chargé des Recherches).
Jim Jing and Scott Hamill
3/1/17
The Verifiable Robotics Research Group has been exploring different aspects of modularity in robot control and design. In this two part talk, Jim will describe current work on high-level control of modular robots (in collaboration with Mark Campbell’s and Mark Yim’s groups) and Scott will describe our initial thoughts on task-influenced design of modular soft robots (in collaboration with Rob Shepherd’s group).
