Speaker: Nic Carey

Abstract: Social animals (including humans and insects) can spontaneously collaborate on challenging and complex physical tasks with little to no explicit communication, coordinating their behavior through the shared channel provided by a collectively held object. Robots, however, lack the social and experiential context required to intuit a collective goal and dexterously manipulate an unknown load as a group without some form of morphological restriction or task-specific architecture. In this talk, I will discuss some previous approaches to generalized cooperative manipulation, and explore how we might overcome the remaining challenges to create control frameworks enabling heterogenous robotic groups to physically collaborate in unstructured environments.

Bio: Nicole Carey is a Senior Research Scientist at the Autodesk Robotics Laboratory, developing enabling technologies to unlock the future of construction, manufacturing, and design for a sustainable future. Her interests lie in the intersection of ecology, ethology, and automation, advancing robotic capabilities by studying the natural world, and leveraging new technology to support ecological investigation and intervention. Nicole obtained her PhD on bio-inspired visual navigation at the Australian National University, worked on early humanoid platforms at Engineered Arts Ltd., and researched swarm robotics at Harvard University's Designing Emergence Laboratory.