Calendar

Nov
11
Wed
Aaron Ames: Towards the Humanoid Robots of Science Fiction @ B17 Hackerman Hall
Nov 11 @ 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

Abstract

The humanoid robot DURUS was unveiled to the public in the midst of the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC). While the main competition took place in the stadium, DURUS took part in the Robot Endurance Test with the goal of demonstrating locomotion that is an order of magnitude more efficient than existing bipedal walking on humanoid robots, e.g., the ATLAS robot utilized in the DRC. During this accessible public demonstration of humanoid robotic walking, DURUS walked continuously for over 2½ hours covering over 2 km—all on a single 1.1 kWh battery. At the core of this success was a methodology for designing and realizing dynamic and efficient walking gaits on bipedal robots through a mathematical framework that utilizes hybrid systems models coupled with nonlinear controllers that provably result in stable locomotion. This mathematical foundation allowed for the full utilization of novel mechanical components of DURUS, including: efficient cycloidal gearboxes (allowing for almost lossless transmission of power) and compliant elements at the ankles (absorbing the impacts at foot-strike). Through this combination of formal controller design and novel mechanical design, the humanoid robot DURUS was able to achieve the most efficient walking ever recorded on a humanoid robot. This talk will outline the key elements of the methodology used to achieve this result, demonstrate the extensibility to other bipedal robots and robotic assistive devices, e.g., prostheses, and consider the question: when will the humanoid robots of science fiction become science fact?

 

Speaker Bio

Aaron D. Ames joined the Georgia Institute of Technology in July 2015 as an Associate Professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, he was an Associate Professor and Morris E. Foster Faculty Fellow II in Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University, with joint appointments in Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science & Engineering. Dr. Ames received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and a B.A. in Mathematics from the University of St. Thomas in 2001, and he received a M.A. in Mathematics and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from UC Berkeley in 2006. He served as a Postdoctoral Scholar in Control and Dynamical Systems at the California Institute of Technology from 2006 to 2008. At UC Berkeley, he was the recipient of the 2005 Leon O. Chua Award for achievement in nonlinear science and the 2006 Bernard Friedman Memorial Prize in Applied Mathematics. Dr. Ames received the NSF CAREER award in 2010 for his research on bipedal robotic walking and its applications to prosthetic devices, and is the recipient of the 2015 Donald P. Eckman Award recognizing an outstanding young engineer in the field of automatic control. His lab designs, builds and tests novel bipedal robots, humanoids and prostheses with the goal of achieving human-like bipedal robotic walking and translating these capabilities to robotic assistive devices.

 

Mar
22
Wed
JHU Robotics Industry Day 2017 @ Johns Hopkins University Homewood Campus
Mar 22 all-day

 

The Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics will highlight its elite robotics students and showcase cutting-edge research projects in areas that include Medical Robotics, Extreme Environments Robotics, Human-Machine Systems for Manufacturing, BioRobotics and more. JHU Robotics Industry Day will take place from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. in Hackerman Hall on the Homewood Campus at Johns Hopkins University.

Robotics Industry Day will provide top companies and organizations in the private and public sectors with access to the LCSR’s forward-thinking, solution-driven students. The event will also serve as an informal opportunity to explore university-industry partnerships.

You will experience dynamic presentations and discussions, observe live demonstrations, and participate in speed networking sessions that afford you the opportunity to meet Johns Hopkins most talented robotics students before they graduate.

Please contact Rose Chase if you have any questions.


Download our 2017 Industry Day booklet

Schedule of Events

(times are subject to change)

               LEVERING GREAT HALL

8:00    Registration and Continental Breakfast

8:30    Welcome: Larry Nagahara, Associate Dean for Research, JHU

8:35     Introduction to LCSR: Director Russell H. Taylor

8:55    Research and Commercialization Highlights

9:00    Louis Whitcomb, LCSR

9:10    Noah Cowan & Erin Sutton, LCSR

9:20    Marin Kolilarov, LCSR

9:30    Philipp Stolka, Clear Guide Medical

9:40    Mehran Armand, APL and LCSR

9:50    Stephen L. Hoffman, Sanaria, Inc.

10:00  COFFEE BREAK

10:10  Bernhard Fuerst, LCSR

10:20  Bruce Lichorowic, Galen Robotics

10:30  David Narrow, Sonavex, Inc.

10:40  Kelleher Guerin & Benjamin Gibbs, READY Robotics

10:50  Promit Roy, Max and Haley LLC

11:00  John Krakauer, Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare Update, JHU

11:10   New Faculty Talks

11:10 – Muyinatu Bell

11:30 – Jeremy D. Brown

               HACKERMAN HALL B17 LOBBY

12:00-1:15     LUNCH

               HACKERMAN HALL ROBOTORIUM

12:00-1:15     Poster + Demo Sessions

               HACKERMAN HALL B17

1:15-3:00       Student and Industry Speed Networking


Please contact Rose Chase if you have any questions. Download PDF of Campus Map & Schedule of Events

 

Sep
6
Wed
LCSR Seminar: Welcome/Welcome Back Town Hall @ B17 Hackerman Hall
Sep 6 @ 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

Abstract

 

This is the Fall 2017 Kick-Off Seminar, presenting an overview of LCSR, useful information, and an introduction to the faculty and labs.

Sep
20
Wed
LCSR Seminar: Chien-Ming Huang ” Designing Intuitive Interactions for Human-Robot Teams” @ B17 Hackerman Hall
Sep 20 @ 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

Abstract

Robots hold promise in assisting people in a variety of domains including healthcare services, household chores, collaborative manufacturing, and educational learning. In supporting these activities, robots need to engage with humans in cooperative interactions in which they work together toward a common goal in a socially intuitive manner. Such interactions require robots to coordinate actions, predict task intent, direct attention, and convey relevant information to human partners. In this talk, I will present how techniques in human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, and robotics can be applied in a principled manner to create and study intuitive interactions between humans and robots. I will demonstrate social, cognitive, and task benefits of effective human-robot teams in various application contexts. I will discuss broader impacts of my research, as well as future directions of my research focusing on intuitive computing.

 

Bio

Chien-Ming Huang is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in the Whiting School of Engineering at The Johns Hopkins University. His research seeks to enable intuitive interactions between humans and machines to augment human capabilities. Dr. Huang received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2015, his M.S. in Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2010, and his B.S. in Computer Science at National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan in 2006. His research has been awarded a Best Paper Runner-Up at Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2013 and has received media coverage from MIT Technology Review, Tech Insider, and Science Nation.

Oct
18
Wed
LCSR Seminar: Ziv Yaniv “SimpleITK: Image Analysis Without the Agonizing Pain” @ B17 Hackerman Hall
Oct 18 @ 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

Abstract

SimpleITK is a simplified, open source, multi-language interface to the National Library of Medicine’s Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK), a C++ open source image analysis toolkit which is widely used in academia and industry. SimpleITK is available in multiple programing languages including: Python, R, Java, C#, C++, Lua, Ruby, and TCL. Binary versions of the toolkit are available for the GNU Linux, Apple OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems. For researchers, the toolkit facilitates rapid prototyping and evaluation of image-analysis workflows with minimal effort using their programming language of choice. For educators and students, the toolkit’s concise interface and support of scripting languages facilitates experimentation with well-known algorithms, allowing them to focus on algorithmic understanding rather than low level programming skills.

 

The toolkit development process follows best software engineering practices including code reviews and continuous integration testing, with results displayed online allowing everyone to gauge the status of the current code and any code that is under consideration for incorporation into the toolkit. User support is available through a dedicated mailing list, the project’s Wiki, and on GitHub. The source code is freely available on GitHub under an Apache-2.0 license (github.com/SimpleITK/SimpleITK). In addition, we provide a development environment which supports collaborative research and educational activities in the Python and R programming languages using the Jupyter notebook web application. It too is freely available on GitHub under an Apache-2.0 license (github.com/InsightSoftwareConsortium/SimpleITK-Notebooks).

 

The first part of the presentation will describe the motivation underlying the development of SimpleITK, its development process and its current state. The second part of the presentation will be a live demonstration illustrating the capabilities of SimpleITK as a tool for reproducible research.

 

Bio

Dr. Ziv Yaniv is a senior computer scientist with the Office of High Performance Computing and Communications, at the National Library of Medicine, and at TAJ Technologies Inc. He obtained his Ph.D. in computer science from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem Israel. Previously he was an assistant professor in the department of radiology, Georgetown university, and a principal investigator at Children’s National Hospital in Washington DC. He was chair of SPIE Medical Imaging: Image-Guided Procedures, Robotic Interventions, and Modeling (2013-2016) and program chair for the Information Processing in Computer Assisted Interventions (IPCAI) 2016 conference.

 

He believes in the curative power of open research, and has been actively involved in development of several free open source toolkits, including the Image-Guided Surgery Toolkit (IGSTK), the Insight Registration and Segmentation toolkit (ITK) and SimpleITK.