PhD Thesis Defense

Abstract: In the field of human-robot interaction (HRI), integration of robots into social settings, such as healthcare and education, is gaining traction. Robots that provide individualized support to improve human performance and subjective experience will generally be more successful in these domains. Robots should personalize their interactions, be aware of the contextual nuances surrounding their [...]

Abstract: The integration of soft and multifunctional materials in emerging technologies is becoming more widespread due to their ability to enhance or improve functionality in ways not possible using typical rigid alternatives. This trend is evident in various fields. For example, wearable technologies are increasingly designed using soft materials to improve modulus compatibility with biological [...]

Abstract: This thesis aims to provide a framework for combining complementary tools that enable robots to manipulate objects in the world using diverse forms of knowledge. We consider heterogeneous types of knowledge, such as physics-based models, learned dynamics models, and model-free skills learned from human demonstrations. Each form of knowledge comes with its own assumptions [...]

Abstract: How can we build generalist robot systems? Looking at fields such as vision and language, the common theme has been large scale end-to-end learning with massive, curated datasets. In robotics, on the other hand, scale alone may not be enough due to the significant multimodality of robotics tasks, lack of easily accessible data and [...]

Abstract: To integrate robots seamlessly into daily life, they must be able to handle a variety of tasks in diverse environments, like cooking in restaurants or tidying up around the house. Many of the items in these environments are deformable such as fruits or bed sheets and a certain level of dexterity is necessary to [...]

Abstract: Climbing robots can operate in steep and unstructured environments that are inaccessible to other ground robots, with applications ranging from the inspection of artificial structures on Earth to the exploration of natural terrain features throughout the solar system. Climbing robots for planetary exploration face many challenges to deployment, including mass restrictions, irregular surface features, [...]