Karthik Ramani
Donald W. Feddersen Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Purdue University
Friday, October 16, 2020 – 1:30pm to 3:00pm
Seminar will be presented via Zoom
Augmenting Humans in Design Fabrication, Robotics, and Workflows Through Spatially Aware Interfaces
The convergence of many factors such as low-cost sensors, electronics, computing, fabrication, and more recently machine learning, aided by new designs for human interactive interfaces, has created the potential to redesign our physical ecosystem. I will describe three themes in our research. First is redesigning intuitive design tools to enable easy access to manufacturing for non-experts. I will provide examples of mixed dimensional suggestive modeling and creating objects directly for use in the physical world. Second, I will show construction of reconfigurable modular robots and mixed reality interactions with new forms of distributed intelligence and spatial-visual programming system for robot-IoT workflows. Such interfaces can give rise to vastly new forms of smart machines, robotic structures, and functions. Third, I will demonstrate new forms of location-aware collaborative intelligence and information exchange between humans-robots and contexts. I will describe two augmented reality constructs: (a) GhostAR, a time-space editor for authoring and embodied acting for Human-Robot-Collaborative (HRC) tasks in-situ, and (b) CAPturAR, an in-situ programming tool that supports users to rapidly author context-aware applications by referring to their previous activities. With such possibilities, human work can be more productive and agile by using cognitively intuitive and spatially aware interfaces that can increase human capacity and aid the human(s)-robot(s)-machine(s) to work together. Our research directions in human augmentation technologies, while merging the digital and physical spaces, is positioned to have a direct impact on workforce re-skilling programs, increasing human labor capacity, factory productivity, and agility.
Full details are available at https://www.hcii.cmu.edu/news/seminar/event/2020/10/seminar-karthik-ramani