Events & Talks

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium 09-08-2019 Illusive and Realistic Vibrotactile Feedback: 2D Phantom Sensation and Vibrotactile Dimensional Reduction Many hapticians have designed and implemented haptic effects to various user interactions. For several decades, hapticians have proved that the haptic feedback can improve multiple facets of user experience including task performance, analyzing and utilizing user perception, and substituting other sensory modalities. Among them, this talk introduces two representative rendering methods to provide vibrotactile effects to users: 2D phantom sensation that makes a user perceive illusive tactile perception by using multiple real vibrotactile actuators and vibrotactile dimensional reduction that ... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Perceiving Systems Talk 30-07-2019 Relighting Humans: Occlusion-Aware Inverse Rendering for Full-Body Human Images Relighting of human images has various applications in image synthesis. For relighting, we must infer albedo, shape, and illumination from a human portrait. Previous techniques rely on human faces for this inference, based on spherical harmonics (SH) lighting. However, because they often ignore light occlusion, inferred shapes are biased and relit images are unnaturally bright particularly at hollowed regions such as armpits, crotches, or garment wrinkles. This paper introduces the first attempt to infer light occlusion in the SH formulation directly. Based on supervised learning using conv... Senya Polikovsky Jinlong Yang

Perceiving Systems Talk 23-07-2019 Self-supervised 3D hand pose estimation Deep learning has significantly advanced state-of-the-art for 3D hand pose estimation, of which accuracy can be improved with increased amounts of labelled data. However, acquiring 3D hand pose labels can be extremely difficult. In this talk, I will present our recent two works on leveraging self-supervised learning techniques for hand pose estimation from depth map. In both works, we incorporate differentiable renderer to the network and formulate training loss as model fitting error to update network parameters. In first part of the talk, I will present our earlier work which approximates... Dimitris Tzionas

Physical Intelligence Talk 22-07-2019 - 22-04-2019 An introduction to bladder cancer & challenges for translational research

IS Colloquium 17-07-2019 Robotic materials for the intelligent systems of the future: From soft robotics to energy capture Robots today rely on rigid components and electric motors based on metal and magnets, making them heavy, unsafe near humans, expensive and ill-suited for unpredictable environments. Nature, in contrast, makes extensive use of soft materials and has produced organisms that drastically outperform robots in terms of agility, dexterity, and adaptability. The Keplinger Lab aims to fundamentally challenge current limitations of robotic hardware, using an interdisciplinary approach that synergizes concepts from soft matter physics and chemistry with advanced engineering technologies to introduce r...

Physical Intelligence Talk 16-07-2019 Magnetically and Optically Active Nanoparticles and Polymer Composites Magnetic fields and light can be used to assemble, manipulate, and heat nanoparticles (NPs) and to remotely actuate polymer composites. Simple soft robots will be presented, where incorporation of magnetic and plasmonic NPs makes them responsive to magnetic fields and light. Application of magnetic fields to dispersions of magnetic NPs drives their assembly into chains. Dipolar coupling within the chains is a source of magnetic anisotropy, and chains of magnetic NPs embedded in a polymer matrix can be used to program the response of soft robots, while still using simple architectures. Wavel... Metin Sitti

Perceiving Systems Talk 10-07-2019 Robust and High-Fidelity Human Digitization from Minimal Inputs Realistic digital avatars are increasingly important in digital media with potential to revolutionize 3D face-to-face communication and social interactions through compelling digital embodiment of ourselves. My goal is to efficiently create high-fidelity 3D avatars from a single image input, captured in an unconstrained environment. These avatars must be close in quality to those created by professional capture systems, yet require minimal computation and no special expertise from the user. These requirements pose several significant technical challenges. A single photograph provides only p... Timo Bolkart

Intelligent Control Systems Talk 09-07-2019 Cognitive Production Systems – AI in Production Fraunhofer IPA in Stuttgart is one of the largest institutes within the Fraunhofer Society with a strong focus on production technologies and automation. Research and technology transfer efforts on machine learning and artificial intelligence are concentrated at IPA’s Center for Cyber Cognitive Intelligence (CCI). This talk gives an introduction to CCI‘s mission and typical industrial applications being addressed. Furthermore, an overview of the research areas and a deep dive into selected topics are provided. Examples are 6D pose estimation for robotic bin-picking, explainable machine lear... Sebastian Trimpe

Event 05-07-2019 Sommer-Kolloquium 2019 des MPI für Intelligente Systeme MPI-IS lädt Sie herzlich zum Sommer-Kolloquium 2019 ein Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Matthias Tröndle Ildikó Papp-Wiedmann Barbara Kettemann

Intelligent Control Systems Talk 01-07-2019 Thermoacoustic instabilities: various approaches to estimation and control Reducing the size and emissions of gas turbine engines used in the aeronautics industry forces manufacturers to explore new operating conditions. An undesirable phenomenon called thermo-acoustic instabilities may occur, caused by the coupling between combustion dynamics and the acoustics of the combustion chamber. To help predict, detect and suppress it, we explore various approaches. We will discuss the design of observers for infinite-dimensional systems, Fourier-based reduced-order modeling as well as a Machine-Learning approach based on high-fidelity simulation data. Sebastian Trimpe Mona Buisson-Fenet

Autonomous Vision Event 30-06-2019 - 07-07-2019 3rd Computational Vision Summer School The 3rd Computational Vision Summer School offers a broad perspective on biological vision and computer vision with a thorough understanding of the theoretical and computational challenges involved. The school is unique in bringing together people from diverse disciplines who all share a computational view of vision. The faculty consists of renowned senior researchers in the field, teaching lectures and providing hands-on tutorials on topics ranging from early vision to image understanding. Michael Black Andreas Geiger Siyu Tang

Physical Intelligence Talk 28-06-2019 Programming Intelligence through Geometry, Topology, and Anisotropy Geometry is concerned with the properties of configurations of points, lines, and circles, while topology is concerned with space, dimension, and transformation. Geometry is also materials independent and scale invariant. By introducing holes and cuts in 2D sheets, we demonstrate dramatic shape change and super-conformability via expanding or collapsing of the hole arrays without deforming individual lattice units. When choosing the cuts and geometry correctly, we show folding into the third dimension, known as kirigami. The kirigami structures can be rendered pluripotent, that is changing ...

Perceiving Systems Talk 05-06-2019 Anthropomorphism in Surgical Robotics and Wearable Technologies Over the past century, abdominal surgery has seen a rapid transition from open procedures to less invasive methods such as laparoscopy and robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (R-A MIS), as they involve reduced blood loss, postoperative morbidity and length of hospital stay. Furthermore, R-A MIS has offered refined accuracy and more ergonomic instruments for surgeons, further minimising trauma to the patient. However, training surgeons in MIS procedures is becoming increasingly long and arduous, while commercially available robotic systems adopt a design similar to conventional laparos... Dimitris Tzionas

Haptic Intelligence Talk 04-06-2019 Career-Building Strategies for Postdocs and Ph.D. Students Sign-Up! is a career-building program for female post-docs in the Max Planck Society. This program aims to prepare post-doctoral researchers for their future scientific careers by several interactive training sessions and networking activities. As a selected member of this program, I will summarize the workshops that I participated in this year. My talk will cover topics about success factors in scientific careers, career planning, professional communication and leadership, self-presentation, and research funding. Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium 03-06-2019 Anthropomorphism in Surgical Robotics and Wearable Technologies Over the past century, abdominal surgery has seen a rapid transition from open procedures to less invasive methods such as laparoscopy and robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (R-A MIS), as they involve reduced blood loss, postoperative morbidity and length of hospital stay. Furthermore, R-A MIS has offered refined accuracy and more ergonomic instruments for surgeons, further minimising trauma to the patient. However, training surgeons in MIS procedures is becoming increasingly long and arduous, while commercially available robotic systems adopt a design similar to conventional laparos... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium 23-05-2019 Human Factors Research in Minimally Invasive Surgery Health care is probably the last remaining unsafe critical system. A large proportion of reported medical errors occur in the hospital operating room (OR), a highly complex sociotechnical environment. As technology is being introduced into the OR faster than surgeons can learn to use them, surgical errors result from the unfamiliar instrumentation, increased motoric, perceptual and cognitive demands on the surgeons, as well as the lack of adequate training. Effective technology design for minimally invasive surgery requires an understanding of the system constraints of remote surgery, and t... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Perceiving Systems Talk 03-05-2019 Modeling shape space of clothed human using a learning approach In the past few years, significant progress has been made on shape modeling of human body, face, and hands. Yet clothing shape is currently not well presented. Modeling clothing using physics-based simulation can sometimes involve tedious manual work and heavy computation. Therefore, a data-driven learning approach has emerged in the community. In this talk, I will present a stream of work that targeted to learn the shape of clothed human from captured data. It involves 3D body estimation, clothing surface registration and clothing deformation modeling. I will conclude this talk by outlini... Timo Bolkart

Talk 02-05-2019 Biological Devices: Self-Actuated Protein Delivery Systems Programming cellular devices to deliver proteins or small molecules using synthetic genetic regulation can be employed in many areas such as biomedicine, living therapeutics, living materials and many others. A biological device composed of a cellular sensor coupled with a programmed protein delivery system can lead the formation of a synthetic system that can sense the environmental inputs, carry out calculations and create an output. Using this approach, we have built cellular devices those can sense environmental signals and creates an output in the form of protein secretion. In this tal...

Perceiving Systems Talk 26-04-2019 Using RGB-D cameras for scene streaming and navigation in virtual reality Since the release of the Kinect, RGB-D cameras have been used in several consumer devices, including smartphones. In this talk, I will present two challenging uses of this technology. With multiple RGB-D cameras, it is possible to reconstruct a 3D scene and visualize it from any point of view. In the first part of the talk, I will show how such a scene can be streamed and rendered as a point cloud in a compelling way and its appearance improved by the use of external cinema cameras. In the second part of the talk, I will present my work on how an RGB-D camera can be used for enabling real-w... Sergi Pujades

Modern Magnetic Systems Max Planck Lecture 23-04-2019 Magnetocaloric Effect: From Energy Efficient Refrigeration to Fundamental Studies of Phase Transitions Joachim Gräfe Michael Hirscher

Empirical Inference Talk 11-04-2019 Unsupervised Learning: Passiv and Active I’ll start with a concept of 1990 that has become popular: unsupervised learning without a teacher through two adversarial neural networks (NNs) that duel in a minimax game, where one NN minimizes the objective function maximized by the other. The first NN generates data through its output actions, the second NN predicts the data. The second NN minimizes its error, thus becoming a better predictor. But it is a zero sum game: the first NN tries to find actions that maximize the error of the second NN. The system exhibits what I called “artificial curiosity” because the first NN is motivated ... Bernhard Schölkopf

Physical Intelligence Talk 04-04-2019 Vignettes of physical ecology of insects and insect based bio-inspiration Insect chemical ecology is a mature, long standing field, with its own journal. By contrast, insect physical ecology is much less studied and the worked scattered. Using work done in my group, I will highlight locomotion, both in granular materials like sand and at the water surface as well as sensing, in particular olfaction and flow sensing. The bio-inspired implementations in MEMS technologies will be the closing chapter. Metin Sitti

Event 28-03-2019 Girls‘ Day 2019 – Stuttgarter Max-Planck-Campus macht wieder mit Schülerinnen entdecken den spannenden Beruf der Wissenschaftlerin Barbara Kettemann Linda Behringer

Talk 25-03-2019 Modularity and transfer in reinforcement learning Learning new control strategies for (possibly unknown) dynamical systems is a challenging task. Reinforcement learning algorithms typically require 'fresh' data regularly, but obtaining data safely and in sufficient quantities is a challenge on real systems. Thus, it is no surprise that most recent successes have been in domains where massive amounts of data can easily be generated in simulation (e.g., games such as Atari and Go). Georg Martius Mara Cascianelli

Empirical Inference IS Colloquium 25-03-2019 Probabilistic symmetry and invariant neural networks In an effort to improve the performance of deep neural networks in data-scarce, non-i.i.d., or unsupervised settings, much recent research has been devoted to encoding invariance under symmetry transformations into neural network architectures. We treat the neural network input and output as random variables, and consider group invariance from the perspective of probabilistic symmetry. Drawing on tools from probability and statistics, we establish a link between functional and probabilistic symmetry, and obtain functional representations of probability distributions that are invariant or eq... Isabel Valera

Physical Intelligence Talk 21-03-2019 Reprogramming Microbial Cells With An Engineering Language The molecular connectivity between genes and proteins inside a cell shows a good degree of resemblance with complex electrical circuits. This inspires the possibility of engineering a cell similar to an engineering device by plugging in genetic logic circuits. This approach, which is loosely defined as synthetic biology is an emerging field of bioengineering, where scientist use electrical and computer engineering principle to re-program cellular functions with a potential to solve next generation challenges in medicine, materials, energy, and space travel. In this talk, we discuss our effo... Metin Sitti

Intelligent Control Systems Talk 18-03-2019 Advances in inertial sensor fusion and learning control and how they enable biomimetic neuroprostheses Neurological disorders and injuries lead to a loss of sensorimotor function in the central nervous system, which controls the musculoskeletal system. Novel systems and control methods can be employed to create neuroprostheses that restore these functions to an unprecedented degree by two major advances: (1) Long standing limitations of inertial motion tracking are overcome by novel parameter estimation and sensor fusion methods. (2) A recent extension of classic learning control methods facilitates real-time pattern adaptation in artificial muscle recruitment. We review the role of these me... Sebastian Trimpe

Talk 27-02-2019 Design of functional polymers for biomedical applications Functional polymers can be easily tailored for their interaction with living organismes. In our Group, we have worked during the last 15 years in the development of this kind of polymeric materials with different funcionalities, high biocompatibility and in different forms. In this talk, we will describe the synthesis of thermosensitive thin films that can be used to prevent biofilm formation in medical devices, the preparation of biodegradable polymers specially designed for vectors for gene transfection and a new familliy of zwitterionic polymers that are able to cross intestine mucouse ... Metin Sitti

Haptic Intelligence Talk 25-02-2019 "Exploring” Haptics: Human-Machine Interactive Applications from Mid-Air Laser Haptics to Sensorimotor Skill Learning Haptic technologies in both kinesthetic and tactile aspects benefit a brand-new opportunity to recent human-machine interactive applications. In this talk, I, who believe in that one of the essential role of a researcher is pioneering new insights and knowledge, will present my previous research topics about haptic technologies and human-machine interactive applications in two branches: laser-based mid-air haptics and sensorimotor skill learning. For the former branch, I will introduce our approach named indirect laser radiation and its application. Indirect laser radiation utilizes a laser... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Haptic Intelligence Talk 25-02-2019 Virtual Reality Based Needle Insertion Simulation With Haptic Feedback: A Psychophysical Study Needle insertion is the most essential skill in medical care; training has to be imparted not only for physicians but also for nurses and paramedics. In most needle insertion procedures, haptic feedback from the needle is the main stimulus that novices are to be trained in. For better patient safety, the classical methods of training the haptic skills have to be replaced with simulators based on new robotic and graphics technologies. The main objective of this work is to develop analytical models of needle insertion (a special case of epidural anesthesia) including the biomechanical and psy... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Haptic Intelligence Talk 14-02-2019 Perceptual and Affective Characteristics of Tactile Stimuli With the advent of technology, tactile stimuli are adopted widely in many human-computer interactions. However, their perceptual and emotional characteristics are not much studied yet. In this talk, to help in understanding these characteristics, I will introduce my perception and emotion studies, as well as my future research plan. For perceptual characteristics, I will introduce an estimation method for perceived intensity of superimposed vibrations, verbal expressions for vibrotactile stimuli, and adjectival magnitude functions. Then, I will present a vibrotactile authoring tool that ut... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Physical Intelligence Talk 14-02-2019 Synthetic Biology, Spatial Programming, and Human Interaction Design with Living Multi-Cell Systems I will share my vision that microbiological systems should be as programmable, interactive, accessible, constructible, and useful as our personal electronic devices. Natural multi-cellular organisms and symbiotic systems achieve complex tasks through division of labor among cells. Such systems transcend current electronics and robotics in many ways, e.g., they synthesize chemicals, generate active physical forms, and self-replicate. Harnessing these features promises significant impact for manufacturing (bioelectronics / smart materials /swarm robotics), health (tissue engineering), chemist...

Perceiving Systems IS Colloquium 21-12-2018 Mind Games Much existing work in reinforcement learning involves environments that are either intentionally neutral, lacking a role for cooperation and competition, or intentionally simple, when agents need imagine nothing more than that they are playing versions of themselves. Richer game theoretic notions become important as these constraints are relaxed. For humans, this encompasses issues that concern utility, such as envy and guilt, and that concern inference, such as recursive modeling of other players, I will discuss studies treating a paradigmatic game of trust as an interactive partia...

Perceiving Systems Talk 17-12-2018 Generating Faces & Heads: Texture, Shape and Beyond. The past few years with the advent of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs), as well as the availability of visual data it was shown that it is possible to produce excellent results in very challenging tasks, such as visual object recognition, detection, tracking etc. Nevertheless, in certain tasks such as fine-grain object recognition (e.g., face recognition) it is very difficult to collect the amount of data that are needed. In this talk, I will show how, using DCNNs, we can generate highly realistic faces and heads and use them for training algorithms such as face and facial express... Dimitris Tzionas

Perceiving Systems Talk 12-12-2018 Learning Dynamics from Kinematics: Estimating Foot Pressure from Video Human pose stability analysis is the key to understanding locomotion and control of body equilibrium, with numerous applications in the fields of Kinesiology, Medicine and Robotics. We propose and validate a novel approach to learn dynamics from kinematics of a human body to aid stability analysis. More specifically, we propose an end-to-end deep learning architecture to regress foot pressure from a human pose derived from video. We have collected and utilized a set of long (5min +) choreographed Taiji (Tai Chi) sequences of multiple subjects with synchronized motion capture, foot pressure ... Nadine Rueegg

Physical Intelligence Talk 11-12-2018 Magnetically Guided Multiscale Robots and Soft-robotic Grippers The state-of-the-art robotic systems adopting magnetically actuated ferromagnetic bodies or even whole miniature robots have recently become a fast advancing technological field, especially at the nano and microscale. The mesoscale and above all multiscale magnetically guided robotic systems appear to be the advanced field of study, where it is difficult to reflect different forces, precision and also energy demands. The major goal of our talk is to discuss the challenges in the field of magnetically guided mesoscale and multiscale actuation, followed by the results of our research in... Metin Sitti

Talk 11-12-2018 Physical Reasoning and Robot Manipulation Animals and humans are excellent in conceiving of solutions to physical and geometric problems, for instance in using tools, coming up with creative constructions, or eventually inventing novel mechanisms and machines. Cognitive scientists coined the term intuitive physics in this context. It is a shame we do not yet have good computational models of such capabilities. A main stream of current robotics research focusses on training robots for narrow manipulation skills - often using massive data from physical simulators. Complementary to that we should also try to understand how basic pri... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Ildikó Papp-Wiedmann Barbara Kettemann Matthias Tröndle

Perceiving Systems Talk 10-12-2018 Recognizing the Pain Expressions of Horses Recognition of pain in horses and other animals is important, because pain is a manifestation of disease and decreases animal welfare. Pain diagnostics for humans typically includes self-evaluation and location of the pain with the help of standardized forms, and labeling of the pain by an clinical expert using pain scales. However, animals cannot verbalize their pain as humans can, and the use of standardized pain scales is challenged by the fact that animals as horses and cattle, being prey animals, display subtle and less obvious pain behavior - it is simply beneficial for a prey animal ...

Intelligent Control Systems Talk 10-12-2018 Robot Learning for Advanced Manufacturing – An Overview A dominant trend in manufacturing is the move toward small production volumes and high product variability. It is thus anticipated that future manufacturing automation systems will be characterized by a high degree of autonomy, and must be able to learn new behaviors without explicit programming. Robot Learning, and more generic, Autonomous Manufacturing, is an exciting research field at the intersection of Machine Learning and Automation. The combination of "traditional" control techniques with data-driven algorithms holds the promise of allowing robots to learn new behaviors through exper... Sebastian Trimpe Friedrich Solowjow

Physical Intelligence Talk 04-12-2018 Microswimmers: From design principles to their collective swimming Active motion of biological and artificial microswimmers is relevant in the real world, in microfluidics, and biological applications but also poses fundamental questions in non-equi- librium statistical physics. Mechanisms of single microswimmers either designed by nature or in the lab need to be understood and a detailed modeling of microorganisms helps to explore their complex cell design and their behavior. It also motivates biomimetic approaches. The emergent collective motion of microswimmers generates appealing dynamic patterns as a consequence of the non-equilibrium. Metin Sitti Zoey Davidson

Perceiving Systems Talk 27-11-2018 Articulated Human Pose Estimation from Unconstrained Images and Videos In this talk, I will present an overview of my Ph.D. research towards articulated human pose estimation from unconstrained images and videos. In the first part of the talk, I will present an approach to jointly model multi-person pose estimation and tracking in a single formulation. The approach represents body joint detections in a video by a spatiotemporal graph and solves an integer linear program to partition the graph into sub-graphs that correspond to plausible body pose trajectories for each person. I will also introduce the PoseTrack dataset and benchmark which is now the de-facto s... Dimitris Tzionas

Haptic Intelligence Workshop 14-11-2018 Haptipedia: An Interactive Database for Selecting, Ideating, and Learning About Grounded Force-Feedback Devices We have developed Haptipedia, a large online gallery of haptic devices with an initial scope of 105 grounded force-feedback devices. Haptipedia was created to be a community resource that supports designers of all persuasions in ideating, finding, designing, and learning about kinesthetic haptic devices. In this AsiaHaptics workshop, you will learn how to use Haptipedia to address YOUR use case, and you can tell us how to make this resource more useful for you. Hasti Seifi Farimah Fazlollahi Gunhyuk Park Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Physical Intelligence Talk 13-11-2018 Novel directions in the treatment of aneurysms, tumors and venous thrombosis Minimally invasive approaches to vascular disease and cancer have revolutionized medicine. I will discuss novel approaches to vascular bleeding, aneurysm treatment and tumor ablation. Metin Sitti

IS Colloquium 12-11-2018 Muscle as active matter: How fish tune their body mechanics for effective swimming Many fishes swim efficiently over long distances to find food or during migrations. They also have to accelerate rapidly to escape predators. These two behaviors require different body mechanics: for efficient swimming, fish should be very flexible, but for rapid acceleration, they should be stiffer. Here, I will discuss recent experiments that show that they can use their muscles to tune their effective body mechanics. Control strategies inspired by the muscle activity in fishes may help design better soft robotic devices. Ardian Jusufi

Perceiving Systems Talk 02-11-2018 Deep Learning with Perceptually-Motivated and Probabilistic Networks Supervised learning with deep convolutional networks is the workhorse of the majority of computer vision research today. While much progress has been made already, exploiting deep architectures with standard components, enormous datasets, and massive computational power, I will argue that it pays to scrutinize some of the components of modern deep networks. I will begin with looking at the common pooling operation and show how we can replace standard pooling layers with a perceptually-motivated alternative, with consistent gains in accuracy. Next, I will show how we can leverage self-simila... Michael Black

Perceiving Systems Talk 30-10-2018 A fine-grained perspective onto object interactions This talk aims to argue for a fine-grained perspective onto human-object interactions, from video sequences. I will present approaches for the understanding of ‘what’ objects one interacts with during daily activities, ‘when’ should we label the temporal boundaries of interactions, ‘which’ semantic labels one can use to describe such interactions and ‘who’ is better when contrasting people perform the same interaction. I will detail my group’s latest works on sub-topics related to: (1) assessing action ‘completion’ – when an interaction is attempted but not completed [BMVC 2018], (2) determ... Mohamed Hassan

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium 25-10-2018 Artificial Haptic Intelligence for Human-Machine Systems The functionality of artificial manipulators could be enhanced by artificial “haptic intelligence” that enables the identification of object features via touch for semi-autonomous decision-making and/or display to a human operator. This could be especially useful when complementary sensory modalities, such as vision, are unavailable. I will highlight past and present work to enhance the functionality of artificial hands in human-machine systems. I will describe efforts to develop multimodal tactile sensor skins, and to teach robots how to haptically perceive salient geometric features such ... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Adam Spiers

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium 24-10-2018 Artificial Haptic Intelligence for Human-Machine Systems The functionality of artificial manipulators could be enhanced by artificial “haptic intelligence” that enables the identification of object features via touch for semi-autonomous decision-making and/or display to a human operator. This could be especially useful when complementary sensory modalities, such as vision, are unavailable. I will highlight past and present work to enhance the functionality of artificial hands in human-machine systems. I will describe efforts to develop multimodal tactile sensor skins, and to teach robots how to haptically perceive salient geometric features such ... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium 23-10-2018 Control Systems for a Surgical Robot on the Space Station As part of a proposed design for a surgical robot on the space station, my research group has been asked to look at controls that can provide literally surgical precision. Due to excessive time delay, we envision a system with a local model being controlled by a surgeon while the remote system on the space station follows along in a safe manner. Two of the major design considerations that come into play for the low-level feedback loops on the remote side are 1) the harmonic drives in a robot will cause excessive vibrations in a micro-gravity environment unless active damping strategies ar... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Talk 23-10-2018 Learning to Act with Confidence Actively acquiring decision-relevant information is a key capability of intelligent systems, and plays a central role in the scientific process. In this talk I will present research from my group on this topic at the intersection of statistical learning, optimization and decision making. In particular, I will discuss how statistical confidence bounds can guide data acquisition in a principled way to make effective and reliable decisions in a variety of complex domains. I will also discuss several applications, ranging from autonomously guiding wetlab experiments in protein function optim...

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