Faculty Events
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 [...]
Resilient Aerial Autonomy for Science, Search, and Survey
Creative Physical AI
Abstract: Do robots need creativity? I will share my stance that they do need creativity to solve general problems and support human values. Physical AI is a type of AI that enables robots to perceive and interact with a physical world. Trendy approaches in physical AI such as Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models directly map the observations [...]
RI Faculty Business Meeting
Meeting for RI Faculty.
To Be Announced
Do we need geometry for 3D, or 3D for robotics?
Abstract: In the current era of large-scale learning, a ‘bitter lesson’ has been that we should pursue general methods that scale with computation (and data) instead of ones that prioritize human knowledge of the domain. An assumed corollary of this lesson for systems pursuing 3D understanding is that explicit geometry will not be needed for these. Similarly, [...]
Precise and Generalizable Robot Manipulation
Abstract: Robots in factories are still largely limited to structured environments with known object models. How can we bring robots into the more diverse, unstructured settings of our daily lives, where objects may vary widely in shape and appearance, while maintaining reliable performance? A popular direction today is to train generalist robot policies on large-scale internet [...]
Robot Learning and Wearable Interfaces in Pursuit of Robotic Caregivers
Abstract: Designing safe and reliable robotic assistance for caregiving is a grand challenge in robotics. A sixth of the United States population is over the age of 65 and more than 1 in 4 (over 70 million) adults in the United States reported having a disability in 2022. Robotic caregivers could positively benefit society; yet, physical [...]