RI | People | Ethan Tira-Thompson

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Ethan Tira-Thompson
PhD Student

Email address: ejt+@andrew.cmu.edu

Mailing address:
Carnegie Mellon University
Robotics Institute
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Jump to: Research interests | Keywords | Labs & groups | Projects | Publications

Research interests

I am interested in manipulation, locomotion, navigation, consumer/home robotics, and human-computer interaction. These interests come together in my current research to model low-cost servos so they can be used for dynamic and delicate manipulation in consumer devices.

I expect to extend this research to provide a software architecture for manipulation tasks in the Tekkotsu project, allowing developers to semantically describe desired manipulations in a straightforward manner, and rely on the robot to carry out the intended manipulation in a robust manner.

I also enjoy graphic design, photography, and juggling!

Research interest keywords

control, education, machine learning, manipulation, and motion planning

Current Labs & Groups

Tekkotsu Lab - Tekkotsu is an application development framework for robotics that supports high level robot programming, drawing inspiration from ideas in cognitive science. Our target platform is the Sony AIBO.

Past Projects

Skinnerbots - Trainable robots using operant conditioning.

Publications

Note: This list may not be comprehensive. It contains only those publications in the RI publications database. Entries are listed in reverse chronological order.

• Dual-coding representations for robot vision in Tekkotsu
  D.S. Touretzky, N.S. Halelamien, E. Tira-Thompson, J.J. Wales, and K. Usui
  Autonomous Robots, Vol. 22, No. 4, January, 2007, pp. 425 - 435. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [588 KB] copyrighted

• Tekkotsu: A framework for AIBO cognitive robotics.
  D.S. Touretzky and E. Tira-Thompson
  Proceedings of the Twentieth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-05), AAAI Press, Menlo Park, CA, 2005.

• Tekkotsu: Cognitive robotics on the Sony AIBO
  E. Tira-Thompson, N.S. Halelamien, J.J. Wales, and D.S. Touretzky
  Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Cognitive Modelling, July, 2004, pp. 390 - 391. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [91 KB] copyrighted

• Tekkotsu: A Rapid Development Framework for Robotics
  E. Tira-Thompson
  master's thesis, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, May, 2004. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [4218 KB] copyrighted

• Cognitive primitives for mobile robots
  E. Tira-Thompson, N.S. Halelamien, J.J. Wales, and D.S. Touretzky
  AAAI 2004 Fall Symposium Series, "The Intersection of Cognitive Science and Robotics: From Interfaces to Intelligence" report FS-04-05, 2004, pp. 110 - 111. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [219 KB] copyrighted

• Combining configural and TD learning on a robot
  D.S. Touretzky, N. Daw, and E. Tira-Thompson
  Proceedings of the IEEE Second International Conference on Development and Learning, 2002, pp. 47 - 52. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [125 KB] copyrighted