Events

"Distributed Learning for Optimal Planning in Persistent Cooperative Missions" with Yasin Yazıcıoğlu

See the full event page for more information!

The Solid Mechanics Research Seminar is a tradition in the AEM department going back to the mid-1980s. This is an informal seminar where the talks are often given on the board (although slides are fine). The speaker reports on some new and interesting topic related to solid mechanics in some depth and the audience is strongly encouraged to ask questions.

Mr. Jiacheng Yuan (PhD candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering) and Mr. K. Selim Engin (PhD candidate in Computer Science & Engineering), University of Minnesota (Isler group) will present "Reinforcement learning for robotic manipulation and active target localization." View the AEM website for full information about the event and how to log into the Zoom call.

This event has been suspended until further notice. More information coming soon.

You can find out more about Kevin Lynch on his Northwestern robotics website.

This event has been suspended until further notice. More information coming soon.

The LCCMR makes funding recommendations to the legislature for special environment and natural resource projects from the Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund (ENRTF). Professor David Mulla broke down how to navigate through the application process, the type of research that the LCCMR is seeking, and much more.

See Professor David Mulla's breakdown of this type of funding and best practices for application here.

The Power and Perils of Research Data: Generating, Storing & Sharing Data Responsibly

Join us for the fifth annual University of Minnesota Research Ethics Day. The conference will close with a panel of community and local experts speaking about data and information management, the challenges of responsibly using big data, ethical use of data in health-related research including consent, confidentiality, and sensitivity to participant concerns. This final panel will include MnRI faculty Vipin Kumar!

View more information or register on the Research Ethics Day Conference website.

Join us to welcome entrepreneur Greg Appelhof, who will present AIR PIX, the small drone that can take HD photo and video selfies and share them instantly with friends. Learn more about the different challenges from take off, autonomous flight and landing to face finding, focusing and sharp image capturing, and process balancing between the drone and the phone. 

Greg is the founder and CEO of SPRING, and works with AirSelfie, Inc. to develop this technology.

Emulating Biological Search Strategies in Robot Swarms

Natural systems are immensely more adaptive, flexible, and robust than anything built by humans. For example, right now trillions of T cells are crawling through your tissues, without a blueprint of your body or centralized instructions, protecting you from viruses, nascent tumors and their own uncontrolled proliferation. Uncountable numbers of ants crawl across forest canopies, desert sands and perhaps your kitchen counter. Each species uses its own decentralized strategy that tailors a small repertoire of sensing, navigation and communication behaviors to forage effectively in its environment.

While spectacularly successful decentralized collective behaviors have evolved in nature, it remains a challenge to engineer flexible cooperative robotic systems that can function in the real world. We emulate natural search behaviors in robotic swarms that sense, navigate and communicate to search effectively in unmapped environments. We show that provably efficient search algorithms that work well in theory are not necessarily the best algorithms in practice, and that bio-inspired designs can effectively scale to thousands of robots. We implement search algorithms in ground robots designed for NASA to explore for resources and support human settlements on other planets and in UAVs designed to monitor gases emitted in harsh volcanic environments.

Join us on December 6th to discuss this and more, with Dr. Melanie Moses!

About Dr. Moses

Melanie E. Moses is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico and an External Faculty Member at the Santa Fe Institute. She earned a B.S. from Stanford University in Symbolic Systems and a Ph.D. in Biology from UNM.

Her interdisciplinary research crosses the boundaries of Computer Science and Biology through modeling of search processes in complex adaptive systems such as ant colonies and immune systems, and in the bio-inspired design swarms of robots that can autonomously cooperate with each other, scale to large sizes, and adapt to environmental conditions.

She is PI or Co-PI on research funded by NSF, NASA, DARPA, NIH, DOE, Google, Microsoft and the McDonnell Foundation. She has mentored dozens of graduate and undergraduate students and led projects including NM CSforAll, the NASA Swarmathon and the Google ExploreCSR Swarmathon:TNG workshop to engage thousands of women and underrepresented minorities in computer science from high school through graduate school.

The lines between consumer electronics and consumer robotics is blurry. For example, at the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, the list of robotics company exhibits has grown to over 400. Furthermore driverless cars, drones, exo-skeletons, 3D printers and virtual-reality systems are examples of robots that have a consumer focus. 

This talk highlights observations of this phenomena. This is given in the context of an Age of Acceleration characterized by deep learning, cloud-computing, and artificial intelligence. The talk serves to suggest pathways for roboticists and their design and development endeavors.

Join the Minnesota Robotics Institute in welcoming our second guest in the Speaker Series, Dr. Paul Oh, a Lincy Professor of Unmanned Aerial Systems from the University of Nevada - Las Vegas.

About Dr. Paul Oh

Prof. Paul Oh joined the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) as the Lincy Professor of Unmanned Aerial Systems in 2014.  He is the founder and director of the Drones and Autonomous Systems Lab (DASL).  Prior, he was in Drexel University's Mechanical Engineering Department from 2000-2014. 

Dr. Oh received mechanical engineering degrees from McGill (B. Eng 1989), Seoul National (M. Sc. 1992), and Columbia (PhD 1999) universities.  He is a Fellow of NASA (2002), Naval Research Lab (2003), Boeing (2006) and ASME (2012).  He received research (2004 NSF CAREER) and teaching (2005 SAE Ralph Teetor Award for Engineering Education Excellence) awards and authored over 150 publications and 3 books.  From 2008-2010, he served as an NSF Program Director managing the robotics research portfolio.  From 2012-2015 he led Team DRC-Hubo and Team DRC-Hubo@UNLV for the DARPA Robotics Challenge.  Today, he serves as General Chair for IEEE IROS 2020 (IEEE Intelligent Robots and Systems) Conference.