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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

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!

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

• 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.

• Skinnerbots - Trainable robots using operant conditioning.

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