This talk took place in October as part of the UT Austin – Portugal annual conference.
New Paper in IEEE TNSRE Journal
Congratulations to Binghan, Huang and Gray! New research suggests that “hysteretic damping” models of human neuromuscular behavior are more accurate than “mass-spring-damper” models and could improve the performance of strength amplifying exoskeletons. Click the image below to go to IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering.
Ribbon Cutting Ceremony of New Anna Hiss Robotics Building
The HCRL, along with 14 other robotics laboratories on campus participated in the ribbon cutting ceremony of our new robotics building. Among the attendees we had the governor or Texas, the secretary of the Army, the president of the university, and the deans of engineering and natural science. It was a splendid day.
New Autonomous Delivery System (SMADS project)
The HCRL participated in developing an end-to-end autonomous delivery system for the UT campus, capable of bringing food items without human intervention. Here is a pointer to an article in Medium:
https://medium.com/good-systems/robots-in-real-time-c914d1fe2fe2
Best Paper Award from IEEE Transaction on Mechatronics (TMech)
We are honored to receive the best paper award published in 2018 from IEEE Transactions on Mechatronics (TMech). Huge congratulations to Donghyun Kim, Junhyeok Ahn, Nick Paine, and Orion Campbell for their effort and contribution to the paper. Click the image below to access the paper:
Virtual ICRA presentation and paper by Steven Jorgensen
Virtual presentation and paper on coordinating simultaneous manipulation and locomotion for humanoids and dexterous legged robots.
S. Jorgensen, M. Vedantam, R. Gupta, H. Cappel, and L. Sentis, Finding Locomanipulation Plans Quickly in the Locomotion Constrained Manifold, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2020
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.08804.pdf
Video of PhD defense of Steven Jorgensen
During his thesis, Steven has develop theory and implementation that ultimately allowed the humanoid robot Valkyrie to be deployed in a real world setup. Great accomplishment!
Check out our newest paper on autonomous locomotion
Our paper, lead by former student Ye Zhao, PI Luis Sentis, and collaborators, Yinan Li, Ufuk Topcu and Jun Liu, Reactive Task and Motion Planning for Robust Whole-Body Dynamic Locomotion in Constrained Environments, is conditionally accepted to The International Journal of Robotics Research. It describes a symbolic planning and subsymbolic control architecture for humanoid robots to autonomously navigate in complex dynamic environments.
Our control architecture paper has been accepted to IJRR
Our paper, lead by students Donghyun Kim, Steven Jorgensen, Jaemin Lee, Junhyeok Ahn, Jianwen Luo, and PI Luis Sentis, Dynamic Locomotion For Passive-Ankle Biped Robots And Humanoids Using Whole-Body Locomotion Control, is now accepted to The International Journal of Robotics Research. Congratulations to the team! It allows line foot robots such as Mercury and Draco to dynamically walk and recover from push disturbances using Whole-Body Controllers.
First Prize for Undergraduate Thesis on Robust Door Operation
We are happy to share that Miguel Arduengo, a joint student between Catalonia’s UPC and our lab at UT Austin, was awarded the best undergraduate thesis prize in artificial intelligence by the Catalan Association of AI. Click on the image for the pdf.
Humanoid Robot Improvised Explosive Device Response
UT’s Human Centered Robotics Group student Steven Jens Jorgensen collaborates with NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC) and affiliates in testing a unique application for NASA’s Valkyrie humanoid robot to semi-autonomously dispose of explosives in a simulated urban scenario. Congratulations to NASA Johnson Space Center’s ER4 division for leading the effort and to personnel from TRACLabs, The Institute for Human Machine and Cognition (IHMC), Jacobs Technology, METECS, CACI, and The University of Texas at Austin for this team accomplishment.
Newly available recording of 2015 Hot Science – Cool Talks talk
PI, Dr. Sentis, gave this talk for a 400 people general audience of all ages focusing on engaging K-12 students in robotics.
Paper Submission on Control of Liquid Cooled Viscoelastic Bipedal Robots
Introducing our work on control of liquid cooled viscoelastic bipedal robots. Apptronik developed for UT Austin this excellent humanoid lower body robot, dubbed DRACO, and students at UT’s HCRL lab devised actuator control algorithms and integrated Time-to-Velocity Reversal Locomotion and Whole-Body Locomotion Control algorithms. The result is unsupported dynamic balancing of DRACO. A link to the paper preprint is here (click on the image):
Students and PI Enjoying the ICRA Conference
HCRL students, alumni and friends having a good time after presenting and giving a talk at ICRA 2019.
Talk Prof. Sentis at ICRA 2019
Our lab just returned from ICRA 2019 where we had a terrific time. We’re sharing a video of the talk at the workshop on legged robots: https://icra2019wslocomotion.wordpress.com/program
Sagittarius Force Augmentation Exoskeleton Revealed
Apptronik and the Human-Centered Robotics Lab at UT Austin have joined forces to develop a force augmentative exoskeleton called Sagittarius. The video shows a subject wearing a 12 degree-of-freedom human-interactive and high-power density lower-body exoskeleton developed by Apptronik. A whole-body augmentative exoskeleton control algorithm has been jointly developed, allowing the exoskeleton to remove gravitational payload while standing or walking.