Faculty Events
Creative Tools: In Press, In Submission, and In Progress
Abstract: It's been a while since I've had a chance to show the rest of the RI what I and my various collaborators have been working on. So this talk will be an informal and rapid-fire tour through some of the freshest results from my lab, including work that is in press, in submission, and in [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Enabling Collaboration between Creators and Generative Models
Abstract: Generative models have made visual content creation as little effort as writing a short text description. Meanwhile, these models also spark concerns among artists, designers, and photographers about job security and data ownership. This leads to many questions: Will generative models make creators’ jobs obsolete? Should creators stop sharing their work publicly? How can creators [...]
Faculty Candidate Talk: Karl Pertsch
Talk Title: Unlocking Scalable Robot Learning in the Real World Abstract: Many domains of machine learning, from language modeling to computer vision, have recently undergone a shift towards generalist models, whose broad generalization abilities are fueled by large and diverse real-world training datasets and high-capacity model architectures. In robotics, however, it has been challenging to [...]
Faculty Candidate Talk: Aja Carter
Title: Paleorobotics: Design Principles 540 million years in the making Abstract: Bioinspiration has provided key design insights in many fields, particularly in robotics, where there has been an explosion of interest in quadrupedal robot “dogs” and bipedal humanoid robots. However, the designs prescribed by only considering living animals are a small subset of available designs; [...]
Faculty Candidate Talk: Carlo Sferrazza
Title: The Path to Humanoid Intelligence Abstract: Humanoid robots represent the ideal physical embodiment to assist us in the diversity of our daily tasks and human-centric environments. Driven by substantial hardware advancements, progress in artificial intelligence (AI), and a growing demand for adaptable automation, this vision appears increasingly feasible. Yet, to date, humanoid intelligence remains [...]
Faculty Candidate Talk: Jason Ma
Title: Internet Supervision for Robot Learning Abstract: The availability of internet-scale data has led to impressive large-scale AI models in various domains, such as vision and language. For learning robot skills, despite recent efforts in crowd-sourcing robot data, robot-specific datasets remain orders of magnitude smaller. Rather than focusing on scaling robot data, my research takes the alternative path of directly [...]
Autonomous Exploration and Navigation, Full Autonomy System, and Beyond
Abstract: In this talk, I will present work on autonomous exploration and introduce our full autonomy system. The work started several years ago from lidar-based state estimation. Building upon the state estimation module, the autonomy system now contains multiple fundamental modules, e.g. collision avoidance, terrain traversability analysis, and waypoint following. At the high level of [...]
Structured and Adaptive Real2Sim2Real RL for Humanoid Whole-Body Control and Loco-Manipulation
Abstract: Humanoid robots offer two unparalleled advantages in general-purpose embodied intelligence. First, humanoids are built as generalist robots that can potentially do all the tasks humans can do in complex environments. Second, the embodiment alignment between humans and humanoids allows for the seamless integration of human cognitive skills with versatile humanoid capabilities. To fully unleash the [...]
Resilient Autonomy for Extreme and Uncertain Environments
Abstract: Pushing the limit of robot autonomy in real-world challenging environments is the key to making it useful. One of the main challenges is to develop systems that are robust to extreme operating conditions, which introduces sensing degradation. In this talk, I'll present a series of works targeting extreme and uncertain environments, including scenes with dynamic [...]
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 [...]
RI Faculty Business Meeting
Meeting for RI Faculty with lunch.
Designing Community: Co-Designed Sensing, Haptics, and Frugal Robotics for the Public Good
Abstract: This talk presents a portfolio of community‑partnered research that uses co‑design to turn local needs into embodied technologies. I will share case studies that span environmental justice, accessibility, and disaster response. First, an intergenerational air‑quality program where community members learn programming, soldering, open‑source tools, and electrical engineering while building and then deploying DIY air‑quality [...]