The Human Centered Robotics Group

Binghan successfully defends his PhD thesis focusing on theory of human strength amplification using exoskeletons, data-driven nonlinear models of  muscular behavior for controls, and trajectory generation with safety guarantees.

Congratulations to Jaemin Lee for his paper on whole-body trajectory generation for humanoid and legged robots using sampling based dynamic programming published in Springer’s Autonomous Robots.

This talk took place in October as part of the UT Austin – Portugal annual conference.

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.

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.

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

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 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

 

 

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!

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.