Faculty Events

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]