Robotics Colloquium: Guest Speaker - Tariq Iqbal

Title: Toward Fluent Collaboration in Human-Robot Teams.

Abstract: Robots currently have the capacity to help people in several fields, including health care, assisted living, and manufacturing, where they must share physical space and actively interact with people in teams. The performance of these teams depends upon how fluently all team members can jointly perform their tasks. To succeed within a group, a robot must be able to perceive other members' actions, model interaction dynamics, predict future actions, and adapt their plans in real time. In the Collaborative Robotics Lab (CRL), we develop novel perception, prediction, and planning algorithms for robots to coordinate and collaborate with people in complex human environments. In this talk, I will highlight various challenges of deploying robots in real-world settings to work alongside people and present our recent work to tackle several of these challenges.

Short Bio: Tariq Iqbal is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Systems and Information Engineering at the University of Virginia (UVA). Prior to joining UVA, he was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) at MIT. He received his Ph.D. in CS from the University of California San Diego (UCSD). Iqbal leads the Collaborative Robotics Lab (CRL), which focuses on developing artificial intelligence, computer vision, and machine learning algorithms to enable robots to solve problems in human-populated environments, such as factories, hospitals, and educational settings.