Calendar

Mar
30
Wed
LCSR Seminar: Nick Gravish “Design and control of emergent oscillations for flapping-wing flyers and synchronizing swarms” @ https://wse.zoom.us/s/94623801186
Mar 30 @ 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

Link for Live Seminar

Link for Recorded seminars – 2021/2022 school year

 

Abstract:

Locomotion in living systems and bio-inspired robots requires the generation and control of oscillatory motion. While a common method to generate motion is through modulation of time-dependent “clock” signals, in this talk we will motivate and study an alternative method of oscillatory generation through autonomous limit-cycle systems. Limit-cycle oscillators for robotics have many desirable properties including adaptive behaviors, entrainment between oscillators, and potential simplification of motion control. I will present several examples of the generation and control of autonomous oscillatory motion in bio-inspired robotics. First, I will describe our recent work to study the dynamics of wingbeat oscillations in “asynchronous” insects and how we can build these behaviors into micro-aerial vehicles. In the second part of this talk I will describe how limit-cycle gait generation in collective robots can enable swarms to synchronize their movement through contact and without communication. More broadly in this talk I hope to motivate why we should look to autonomous dynamical systems for designing and controlling emergent locomotor behaviors in bio-inspired robotics.

 

Biography:

Dr. Nick Gravish received his PhD from Georgia Tech where he used robots as physical models to motivate and study aspects of biological locomotion. During his post-doc Gravish worked in the microrobotics lab of Rob Wood at Harvard, where he gained expertise in designing and studying insect-scale robots. Gravish is currently an assistant professor at UC San Diego in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department. His lab bridges the gap between bio-inspiration, biomechanics, and robotics, towards the development of new bio-inspired robotic technologies to improve the adaptability and resilience of mobile robots.

Apr
6
Wed
LCSR Seminar: Guy Hoffman “Designing Robots and Designing with Robots” @ https://wse.zoom.us/s/94623801186
Apr 6 @ 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

Link for Live Seminar

Link for Recorded seminars – 2021/2022 school year

 

Abstract:

Designing robots for human interaction is a multifaceted challenge involving the robot’s intelligent behavior, physical form, mechanical structure, and interaction schema. Our lab develops and studies human-centered robots using a combination of methods from AI, Design, and Human-Computer Interaction.  This talk focuses on three recent projects, two concerning the design of a new robot, and one that tackles designing robots that help human designers.

 

Biography:

Guy Hoffman is Associate Professor and the Mills Family Faculty Fellow in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University. Prior to that he was an Assistant Professor at IDC Herzliya and co-director of the IDC Media Innovation Lab. Hoffman holds a Ph.D from MIT in the field of human-robot interaction. He heads the Human-Robot Collaboration and Companionship (HRC²) group, studying the algorithms, interaction schema, and designs enabling close interactions between people and personal robots in the workplace and at home. Among others, Hoffman developed the world’s first human-robot joint theater performance, and the first real-time improvising human-robot Jazz duet. His research papers won several top academic awards, including Best Paper awards at robotics conferences in 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2013, 2015, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021. His TEDx talk is one of the most viewed online talks on robotics, watched more than 3 million times.

Apr
13
Wed
LCSR Seminar: Brian Bittner “Data-driven geometric mechanics: top-down tools for in situ robotic modeling and adaptation to injury” @ https://wse.zoom.us/s/94623801186
Apr 13 @ 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

Link for Live Seminar

Link for Recorded seminars – 2021/2022 school year

 

Abstract:

Many successful approaches to robotic locomotion and manipulation operate with high quality simulation tools. Many such approaches are “bottom-up” in a modeling sense, accounting for all internal forces and environmental interactions explicitly. These “bottom-up” models are used either beforehand (such as in reinforcement learning) and/or in real time.  However, various types of robots are getting smaller, softer, and more complex (e.g. bio-hybrid actuators). Some robots lean on low-precision manufacturing and fabrication techniques, and many robots are now being asked to operate in hard-to-characterize, natural interfaces like the human body. Such attributes can render “bottom-up” simulators impractical for expected use cases on various research frontiers, such as micro-biomedical robots and soft robots deployed in uncharacterized environments. In this talk I will revisit the reconstruction equation, a result from the geometric mechanics literature that offers a “top-down” view of Lagrangian systems, permitting insights into generalizable system behaviors along a spectrum of friction-momentum dominance. I will show how these tools can permit rapid modeling of high complexity robots in their operating environment without the requirement to specify CAD models or any explicit forces. I will also discuss a related strength and weakness of the approach resulting from the use of symmetries. Surprisingly, results in simulation and hardware indicate that even with eight-jointed systems, useful behavioral models can be computed from tens of cycles of data. This suggests that high degree of freedom robots can adjust and excel in situations where explicit force models are poorly understood. I will also briefly discuss a framework for robot recovery that leans on these tools as well as a metric for a robot’s ability to cover the local space of motions, computed on the Lie algebra of the position space. The metric allows primitives to be valued for their contribution to the space of composed motions rather than just their individual qualities. Results here include a Dubins car that can learn how to turn left (with its steering wheel restricted to only turn right) in less than a second as well as a robot made of tree branches that can learn to walk around the laboratory with less than twelve minutes of experimental data. I hope to motivate the general use of structural reductions as we pursue modeling and control of the next generation of high complexity robots.

 

Biography:

Dr. Brian Bittner received a B.S. from Carnegie Mellon and a PhD from Michigan where he researched the theory, simulation, and application of physics informed machine learning for in situ behavior modeling and optimization. He has sought out cross-disciplinary environments for research, collaborating with physicists, biologists, and mathematicians, working to facilitate insights from these fields into robotic systems. Bittner is currently a research scientist at the Applied Physics Lab. He is currently working on approaches to modeling and control for soft robots and underwater manipulation.

Apr
20
Wed
LCSR Seminar: Tim Salcudean “Ultrasound-based guidance for robot assisted prostate surgery” @ https://wse.zoom.us/s/94623801186
Apr 20 @ 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

Link for Live Seminar

Link for Recorded seminars – 2021/2022 school year

 

Abstract:

The talk will present a survey of my research activities, with more detailed presentation of our guidance system for robot-assisted prostate cancer surgery. The majority of prostate cancer surgery is carried out with the da Vinci surgical system. Tracking of instruments and hand-eye calibration of this robotic system enables the overlay of pre-operative magnetic resonance imaging by registration to real-time ultrasound. This enables visualization of sub-surface anatomy and cancer. We will discuss our system design, visualization and registration approaches.

We will also discuss instrumentation for force sensing using the da Vinci Research Kit, and a new approach to teleguidance for ultrasound examinations.

 

Biography:

Tim Salcudean is a Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, where he holds the C.A. Laszlo Chair in Biomedical Engineering. He is cross-appointed with the UBC School of Biomedical Engineering and the Vancouver Prostate Centre. He is on the steering committee of the IPCAI conference and on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Robotics Research. He is a Fellow of IEEE, MICCAI and of the Canadian Academy of Engineering. His research interests are in medical robotics, medical image analysis and elastography imaging.

Apr
27
Wed
LCSR Seminar: Panel on Careers in Robotics A Panel Discussion With Experts From Industry and Academia @ https://wse.zoom.us/s/94623801186
Apr 27 @ 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

Link for Live Seminar

Link for Recorded seminars – 2021/2022 school year

 

Panelists:

  • Courtney Schmitt, BE-3U Lead Controls Engineer, Blue Origin (JHU Class of 2018, B.S. Mechanical Engineering, JHU Class of 2019, M.S.E. Robotics)
    • Courtney is the lead controls engineer at Blue Origin for the BE-3U Engine. Courtney joined Blue Origin in 2019 after completing her Masters in Robotics and her Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. Before joining Blue Origin, Courtney completed an internship at Virgin Galactic and worked at an autonomous underwater vehicle startup. While at Johns Hopkins she participated in a variety of research including a project to map the locations of black holes in the universe, researching autonomous vehicles, and working with the Space Telescope Science Institute for her senior design capstone project. In 2018, she was selected to receive the Brooke Owens Fellowship, a competitive fellowship awarded to women pursuing careers in the space industry. Courtney was also recently named to the 20 under 35 SSPI list in 2021.
      Outside of work hours, Courtney volunteered for the Community School of Baltimore during her undergraduate studies as a STEM educator. She was a co-founder and President of the JHU chapter of the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS) with the goal of bringing together the space community at JHU across a variety of majors and disciplines. She has frequently mentored students as well as an all-girls First Robotics team from the Museum of Flight in Washington.
  • Rachel Hegeman, Software Engineer, Waymo (JHU Class of 2016, B.S. Mechanical Engineering & B.S. Applied Math, JHU Class of 2019, M.S.E. Computer Science)
    • Hi, my name is Rachel and I like robots. I started working with underwater robots at JHU in the Dynamical Systems and Control Lab (DSCL) in 2015, and after graduating undergrad I spent a few years with the JHU Applied Physics Lab (JHUAPL) working on experimental reconnaissance systems. At this time, I also worked with the Biomechanical and Image Guided Surgical Systems Lab (BIGSS) to ascertain the efficacy of various autonomous surgical systems and imaging techniques. I got my Masters in Computer Science in 2019, and then headed west for a job with Waymo working on reasoning within the vehicle’s planner. At Waymo, I just recently transferred teams to focus more on trajectory optimization.
  • Ann Majewicz Fey
  • Amanda Zimmet

 

Aug
31
Wed
LCSR Seminar: Welcome Townhall “Review of LCSR” @ Hackerman B17
Aug 31 @ 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Sep
7
Wed
LCSR Seminar: Tania Morimoto “Flexible Surgical Robots: Design, Sensing, and Control” @ Hackerman B17
Sep 7 @ 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

Link for Live Seminar

Link for Recorded seminars – 2022/2023 school year

 

Abstract:

Flexible and soft medical robots offer capabilities beyond those of conventional rigid-link robots due to their ability to traverse confined spaces and conform to highly curved paths. They also offer potential for improved safety due to their inherent compliance. In this talk, I will present several new robot designs for various surgical applications. In particular, I will discuss our work on soft, growing robots that achieve locomotion by material extending from their tip. I will discuss limitations in miniaturizing such robots, along with methods for actively steering, sensing, and controlling them. Finally, I will discuss new sensing and human-in-the-loop control paradigms that are aimed at improving the performance of flexible surgical robots.

Bio:

Tania Morimoto is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and in the Department of Surgery at the University of California, San Diego. She received the B.S. degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University, Stanford, CA, all in mechanical engineering. Her research lab focuses on the design and control of flexible continuum robots for increased dexterity and accessibility in uncertain environments, particularly for minimally invasive surgical interventions. They are also working to address the challenges of designing human-in-the-loop interfaces for controlling these flexible and soft robots, including the integration of haptic feedback to improve surgical outcomes. She is a recipient of the Hellman Fellowship (2021), the Beckman Young Investigator Award (2022), and the NSF CAREER Award (2022).

Sep
14
Wed
LCSR Seminar: Tamas Haidegger “Medtech research and beyond at Óbuda University” @ Hackerman B17
Sep 14 @ 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

Link for Live Seminar

Link for Recorded seminars – 2022/2023 school year

 

Abstract:

Extreme globalization, war in the Western World, COVID-19 are presenting together an unprecedented challenge for humanity. Engineering intelligent systems and robotics can help to counter-balance the negative effects in a number of ways. Potential technology-driven solutions include the emergence of medical robots, Surgical Data Science, AI-based support for early anomaly detection and health diagnosis, rescue robotics, smart agrifood robotic solutions and beyond. Much of these areas are addressed by the various applied research projects of the University Research and Innovation center (EKIK) at Óbuda University. This presentation highlights through examples the role that robotics and automation can play in living up to global challenges. The talk will also cover the ethical implications of robotics research, in both the emergency and post-pandemic world, with a specific focus on the 2015 UN Sustainable Development Goals.

 

Sep
21
Wed
LCSR Seminar: Mark Savage “Elevator Pitch Workshop” @ Hackerman B17
Sep 21 @ 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Sep
28
Wed
LCSR Seminar: Amy Bastian “Learning and relearning human movement” @ Hackerman B17
Sep 28 @ 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

Link for Live Seminar

Link for Recorded seminars – 2022/2023 school year

 

Abstract:

Human motor learning depends on a suite of brain mechanisms that are driven by different signals and operate on timescales ranging from minutes to years.  Understanding these processes requires identifying how new movement patterns are normally acquired, retained, and generalized, as well as the effects of distinct brain lesions.  The lecture will focus on normal and abnormal motor learning, and how we can use this information to improve rehabilitation for individuals with neurological damage.

 

Bio:

Dr. Amy Bastian is a neuroscientist who has made important contributions to the neuroscience of sensorimotor control.  She is the Chief Science Officer at the Kennedy Krieger Institute, and Director of the motion analysis laboratory that studies the neural control of human movement.  Dr. Bastian is also a Professor of Neuroscience, Neurology and PM&R at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.  Dr. Bastian is a recognized and highly accomplished neuroscientists whose interests include understanding cerebellar function/dysfunction, locomotor learning mechanisms, motor learning in development, and how to rehabilitate people with many types of neurological diseases.

Laboratory for Computational Sensing + Robotics