ICON Seminar in Robotics: Prof. Wenlong Zhang (ASU)

Time: 3:30-4:30 pm Eastern Time, April 5 (Friday), 2024

Location: MSEE 112

Zoom Link: https://purdue-edu.zoom.us/j/98798335169?pwd=ZFNMdmZXendoQ1RCRDczM2dTR1RIdz09

Free coffee and snacks will be provided.

Design, Modeling, and Control of Interactive Robotics

ABSTRACT

Robots are increasingly deployed in interactive tasks with humans and complex environments. These tasks introduce significant uncertainties for autonomous robot operation and new challenges in achieving resilience, safety, task efficiency, and user satisfaction. In the meantime, these new tasks generate exciting opportunities to rethink the process of developing future robots, which starts from robot design and interaction modeling. This talk will present our research progress in these two aspects using current projects on flexible aerial robots and human decision modeling. The first part of the talk will focus on the design and wrench estimation of a quadrotor with passive folding capabilities. Experimental results show that introducing compliance into the aerial robot design not only improves collision resilience, but also enables these robots to achieve autonomous perching and agile flight behaviors by leveraging collisions with the environment. The second part of the talk will introduce our formulation of an incomplete-information game to model human decisions with an application to autonomous driving, and our recent study on the benefits and risks for considering bias in human decision making. Collectively, these projects shed light on the possible integration of design, modeling, and control for future interactive robotics.

SPEAKER

Wenlong Zhang is an Associate Professor in the School of Manufacturing Systems and Networks at Arizona State University (ASU). He received his M.S. in mechanical engineering, M.A. in statistics, and Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, all from the University of California, Berkeley. He joined ASU faculty in 2015 and founded the ASU Robotics and Intelligent Systems Laboratory (RISE Lab). His research interests lie in the development of soft and compliant robots as well as dynamics-aware planning and control algorithms for future robots to interact safely and efficiently with humans and complex environments. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, NSF CISE Research Initiation Award, Bisgrove Early-Career Faculty Award from Science Foundation Arizona, and several best paper awards. Wenlong Zhang is an Associate Professor in the School of Manufacturing Systems and Networks at Arizona State University (ASU). He received his M.S. in mechanical engineering, M.A. in statistics, and Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, all from the University of California, Berkeley. He joined ASU faculty in 2015 and founded the ASU Robotics and Intelligent Systems Laboratory (RISE Lab). His research interests lie in the development of soft and compliant robots as well as dynamics-aware planning and control algorithms for future robots to interact safely and efficiently with humans and complex environments. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, NSF CISE Research Initiation Award, Bisgrove Early-Career Faculty Award from Science Foundation Arizona, and several best paper awards.

Recording:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJoT_3CKUH0&ab_channel=ICONPurdue

Organizers: Ziran Wang (ziran@purdue.edu), Nak-seung Patrick Hyun (nhyun@purdue.edu), & Tho Le (thovle@purdue.edu)