The seminar is scheduled on Fridays at 11am-12pm eastern time (unless otherwise noted). The location is Maeder Hall Auditorium (unless otherwise noted).
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Upcoming Seminars
Prof. Kris Dorsey, Northeastern University
Title: Where the rubber meets the code: Realizing soft robots through better sensor design
Abstract: Physically soft robots have applications to human-machine interfaces, wearable devices for human health, robotics, and novel properties for bioinspiration, grasping, and locomotion. Due to their continuum-like structures, an existing challenge in these applications is creating sensors for self- and external sensing (proprioception and exteroception) to facilitate control and reconfigurability. I will discuss some sensing-related challenges in these soft applications and present recent work that applies these concepts to origami robots, grippers, and wearable devices. I will also present work in enhancing the stability and mechanical selectivity of stretchable sensors and discuss applications for such sensors in wearable healthcare applications, soft robotics, and beyond.
Bio: Kris Dorsey is an associate professor in the departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physical Therapy, Movement, and Rehabilitation Sciences and a core faculty member at the Institute for Experiential Robotics at Northeastern University. Previously, Dorsey was a faculty member in the Picker Engineering Program at Smith College and an MLK Visiting Associate Professor at the Media Lab at MIT.
Dorsey graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering and earned her Bachelors of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Olin College. Dorsey’s current research interests include reconfigurable, novel morphology, and active soft sensors and the design of soft sensors for soft robot actuators and wearable medical and rehabilitation devices. Dorsey’s work has been recognized by an NSF CAREER award and the Emerging Leader ABIE Award in honor of Denice Denton.
Accessibility Message from Kris: I strive to make my talks and work as accessible as possible. This talk will have auto-captions provided on the slides, I am happy to wear a clip-on mic for hearing aids, and attendees may request a digital copy or enlarged printed slides. Please allow 48 hours notice.
Past Seminars
March 7, 2025 - Hadas Kress-Gazit, Cornell University - Formal methods for robotics in the age of big data.
February 21, 2025 - Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio, Yale - Soft robots that evolve on demand.
December 6, 2024 - Andrea Bajcsy, Carnegie Mellon University.
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.