Defense Abstract:

Despite the impressive progress in robotics in recent years, many robot systems still struggle to manage unstructured environments, whether due to irregularly shaped and deformable objects or due to unexpected contacts in cluttered environments. People effectively interact with these objects and environments through a range of strategies that vary in their degree of intentionality. Embodied, or passive behaviors, like the compliance and low inertia of our hands, enable us to limit undesirable outcomes of imprecise motions without any sensory information to inform reactions. Reflexive strategies, which consist of prescribed motions triggered through sub-conscious reactions to sensory information, help avoid harm to ourselves or the environments we interact with. Finally, we use multimodal sensor information – like vision, proprioception, and tactile sensing – to consciously inform our planning and reaction strategies while performing difficult tasks in unstructured environments. In this talk, I will discuss 3 projects which enable robots to manage unstructured environments by using these embodied, reflexive, and multimodal strategies.