Abstract

As a result of more than sixty years of research, there are increasingly more robots working in human environments or alongside humans. With an increasing expectation that robots will actively interact with people and other robots in complex tasks in the homes and factories of the future, we still must solve many theoretical and practical challenges to guarantee the reliability and proper functionality of such complex systems. Robot modeling, control, planning, and high-level task description are commonly treated separately in different layers to manage that complexity. Although that strategy may provide useful abstractions and make the complexity more manageable, it invariably employs techniques that demand intermediate mappings between those layers, which results in a theoretical patchwork that usually introduces unnecessary artifacts in the complete robotic system, such as discontinuities and singularities. In this talk, I will present our efforts to unify robot modeling, control, and planning using a single mathematical language and applications to surgical robots, mobile manipulators, and cooperative robotic systems.

The seminar will be held in the LR3A , Department of Engineering, and online (zoom): https://newnham.zoom.us/j/92544958528?pwd=YS9PcGRnbXBOcStBdStNb3E0SHN1UT09