The seminar is scheduled on Fridays at 11am-12pm eastern time (unless otherwise noted). The location is Bowen Hall, Room 222 (unless otherwise noted).
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Upcoming Seminars
December 6, 2024 - Andrea Bajcsy, Carnegie Mellon University.
Title: Towards Open World Robot Safety
Abstract: Robot safety is a nuanced concept. We commonly equate safety with collision-avoidance, but in complex, real-world environments (i.e., the "open world'') it can be much more: for example, a mobile manipulator should understand when it is not confident about a requested task, that areas roped off by caution tape should never be breached, and that objects should be gently pulled from clutter to prevent falling. However, designing robots that have such a nuanced safety understanding---and can reliably generate appropriate actions---is an outstanding challenge.
In this talk, I will describe my group's work on systematically uniting modern machine learning models (such as large vision-language models, deep neural trajectory predictors, and latent world models) with classical formulations of safety in the control literature to generalize safe robot decision-making to increasingly open world interactions. Throughout the talk, I will present experimental instantiations of these ideas in domains like vision-based navigation, autonomous driving, and robotic manipulation.
Bio: Andrea Bajcsy is an Assistant Professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University where she leads the Interactive and Trustworthy Robotics Lab (Intent Lab). She broadly works at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, control theory, and human-AI interaction. Prior to joining CMU, Andrea received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science from University of California, Berkeley in 2022. She is the recipient of the Google Research Scholar Award (2024), Rising Stars in EECS Award (2021), Honorable Mention for the T-RO Best Paper Award (2020), NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (2016), and worked at NVIDIA Research for Autonomous Driving.
Past Seminars
October 25, 2024 - Nikolai Matni, University of Pennsylvania - What makes learning control easy or hard?
October 11, 2024 - Daniela Mitterberger, Princeton University - Rethinking digital construction: a collaborative future of humans, machines, and craft
April 19, 2024 - Jeannette Bohg, Stanford - Enabling Cross - Embodiment Learning
April 12th, 2024 - Aja Carter, CMU - PaleoPerformance: Connections between Paleobiology and Bioinspired Robots
Apr 5, 2024 - Changliu Liu, CMU - Ensuring Robot Safety Through Safety Index Synthesis
Mar 22, 2024 - Ye Zhao, GA Tech - Unlocking Agility, Safety, and Resilience for Legged Navigation: Addressing Real-world Challenges in Uncertain Environments
Mar 8, 2024 - Marin Kobilarov, JHU - High-confidence Robot Motion Planning under Uncertainty
Feb 23, 2024 - Caitlin Mueller, MIT - Towards Robotic Construction of Sustainable Structures
Feb 9, 2024 - Elad Hazan, Princeton - The theory of online control and its application to robotics
Dec 1, 2023 - Sonia Chernova, Georgia Tech - Autonomy in the Human World: Developing Rob that Handle the Diversity of Human Lives
Nov 17, 2023 - Stephanie Gil, Harvard - Resilient Coordination in Networked Multi-Robot Teams
Nov 10, 2023 - Baffour Osei, Princeton - A Reflection on How to Learn, Learning to Help, and Staying out of the Way
Nov 3, 2023 - Russ Tedrake, MIT - Dexterous Manipulation with Diffusion Policies
Nov 3, 2023 - Monroe Kennedy, Stanford - Collaborative Robotics: From Dexterity to Teammate Prediction
Oct 20, 2023 - Henny Admoni, CMU - Robots that Learn From and Collaborate with People
Oct 06, 2023 - Lerrel Pinto, NYU - Three Lessons for Building General-Purpose Robots
Sep 22, 2023 - Pulkit Agrawal, MIT - Physical Intelligence as API
June 9, 2023 - Vikas Sindhwani, Google Deepmind - Large Language Models with Eyes, Arms and Legs
May 12, 2023, David Fridovich-Keil - Dynamic Game Models for Multi-Agent Interactions: The Role of Information in Designing Efficient Algorithms
April 21, 2023, Renee Zhao - Multifunctional Origami Robots
April 7, 2023, Scott Kuindersma - Task Agility: Making Useful Dynamic Behavior Easier to Create
Mar 24, 2023 - Dorsa Sadigh - Learning Representations for Interactive Robotics
Mar 10, 2023 - Greg Chirikjian - Robot Imagination: Affordance-Based Reasoning about Unknown Objects
Feb 28, 2023 - Danica Kragic - Learning perception, action and interaction
Feb 10, 2023 - Ken Goldberg - The New Wave in Robot Grasping
Dec 2, 2022 - Nadia Figueroa - Collaborative Robots in the Wild: Challenges and Future Directions from a Human-Centric Perspective
Nov 11, 2002 - Andy Zeng - Language as Robot Middleware
Oct 28, 2022 - Tomas Lozano-Perez - Generalization in Planning and Learning for Robotic Manipulation
Oct 14, 2022 - Sarah Tang - Data-Centric ML for Autonomous Driving
Sep 30, 2022 - Radhika Nagpal - Towards Collective A.I.
Sep 16, 2022 - Katie Skinner - Learning from Limited Data for Robot Vision in the Wild
April 22, 2022 - Mac Schwager - Reimagining Robot Autonomy with Neural Environment Representations
April 8, 2022 - Stephen Tu - Learning from many trajectories
March 25, 2022 - Karen Leung - Towards the Unification of Autonomous Vehicle Safety Concepts: A Reachability Perspective
March 11, 2022 - Reza Moini - Bio-inspired Design and Additive Manufacturing of Architected Cement-based Materials
Feb 25, 2022 - Aimy Wissa - Bio-Inspired Locomotion Strategies across Mediums: From Feather-Inspired Flow Control to Beetle-Inspired Jumping
Feb 11, 2022 - Jordan Taylor - The steep part of the learning curve: how cognitive strategies shape motor skill acquisition
Dec 3, 2021 - Naomi Leonard - Collective Intelligence and Multi-Robot System
Nov 19, 2021 - Aaron Ames - Safety-Critical Control of Dynamic Robots
Nov 5, 2021 - Chuchu Fan - Building Dependable Autonomous Systems through Learning Certified Decisions and Control
Oct 8, 2021 - Karthik Narasimhan - Language-guided policy learning for better generalization and safety
Sep 24, 2021 - Daniel Cohen - Living microrobots: controlling cellular swarms and the waterbear as a potential microrobot chassis
Sep 17, 2021 - Michael Posa - Contact-Rich Robotics: Learning, Impact-Invariant Control, and Tactile Feedback
Feb 11, 2021 - Jia Deng - Optimization Inspired Deep Architectures for Multiview 3D
Feb 25, 2021 - Stefana Parascho - Rethinking Architectural Robotics
Mar 11, 2021 - Naveen Verma - AI Meets Large-scale Sensing: preserving and exploiting structure of the real world to enhance machine perception
April 8, 2021 - Jaime Fernandez Fisac - Safe Robots in the Wild: maintaining safety by planning through uncertainty and interaction
April 22, 2021 - Olga Russakovsky, Zhiwei Deng - Evolving Graphical Planner: Contextual Global Planning for Vision-and-Language Navigation
May 6, 2021 - Bartolomeo Stellato - Data-Driven Embedded Optimization for Control