ICON Seminar in Robotics by Prof. Hao Su (New York University)
| Event Date: | September 19, 2025 |
|---|---|
| Speaker: | Prof. Hao Su |
| Speaker Affiliation: | New York University |
| Priority: | No |
| College Calendar: | Show |
Time: 3-4 pm Eastern Time, Sep 12 (Friday), 2025
Location: MSEE 112
Zoom Link: https://purdue-edu.zoom.us/j/98798335169
Coffee and snacks will be provide.
Towards Principled AI Agents under Decentralized and Asymmetric Information
Abstract:
Wearable and surgical robots can assist human capabilities, but their progress has been constrained by two persistent challenges: they are often bulky and confined to lab settings, and they struggle to adapt to unseen scenarios. This talk presents innovations that address these challenges through advances in hardware and algorithms. On the hardware side, I will introduce high-torque density motors that electrify robotic actuation, enabling compact and lightweight medical robots. On the algorithmic side, I will highlight a physics-informed, data-driven learning-in-simulation framework, combined with deep reinforcement learning, that creates adaptive controllers without intensive human experiments and directly overcomes the data scarcity problem that limits many AI methods. Unlike supervised learning, which mimics demonstrations, this approach uses physics-informed reinforcement learning to create novel control policies that generalize to new scenarios. By integrating these two advances, we move beyond lab prototypes toward versatile, real-world robotic systems that make human movement easier, surgery safer, and robotics more accessible.
Speaker:
Dr. Hao Su, PhD, is an Associate Professor at the New York University, He is the Director of Center of Assistive and Personal Robotics for Independent Living (APRIL). He was an associate professor at North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, after previously serving as the Irwin Zahn Endowed Assistant Professor at City College of the City University of New York. He was a Research Scientist at Philips Research North America where he designed robots for lung surgery, and then a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. He obtained Ph.D. degree on Surgical Robotics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Dr. Su received NSF CAREER Award, Switzer Distinguished Fellow by U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Toyota Mobility Challenge Discover Award, the Best Medical Robotics Paper Runner-up Award in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Best Student Paper Award, Dynamic Systems & Control Division, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and Philips Innovation Transfer Award. He received the Advanced Simulation & Training Award from the Link Foundation and Dr. Richard Schlesinger Award from the American Society for Quality. His work was published in IEEE Transactions on Robotics, IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, Nature, Science Robotics, Nature Machine Intelligence, Nature Communications, and Science Advances.
Organizers: Ziran Wang (ziran@purdue.edu), Yan Gu (yangu@purdue.edu), Yu She (shey@purdue.edu)
2025-09-19 08:00:00 2025-09-19 17:00:00 America/Indiana/Indianapolis ICON Seminar in Robotics by Prof. Hao Su (New York University) Purdue University