Gunter Niemeyer, Visting Professor
California Institute of Technology
Abstract
Personally, I often apply two different metrics: One, can the robot do or enable me to do something I otherwise could not? Two, how well does the robot physically interact with me and the world? Perhaps I am willing accommodate a peculiar robot if it adds substantial value, else I want it to submit to my style of interactions and feel natural. The former is often a function of the application while the latter is still in the domain of research and a challenging topic.
In this talk and from such a perspective, I hope to show and review a bunch of robots from Disney (entertainment) to surgery and personal robotics. What would make them better? I argue that we should enable these robots to feel, react, and especially to make sense of the real world through touch. And intend to share my research efforts and plans in these directions. Can we get robots ready for up-close human interactions?
Bio
Günter Niemeyer currently holds a visiting appointment at the California Institute of Technology. For the last 6 years he was a senior research scientist at Disney Research, Los Angeles, where he made robots more expressive, more capable, more interactive, and ultimately more entertaining. He received MS and PhD degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the areas of adaptive robot control and bilateral teleoperation, introducing the concept of wave variables. He also held a postdoctoral research position at MIT developing surgical robotics. In 1997, he joined Intuitive Surgical Inc., where he helped create the da Vinci Minimally Invasive Surgical System. He was a member of the Stanford faculty from 2001-2009, directing the Telerobotics Lab. From 2009-2012 he worked with the PR2 personal robot at Willow garage. His core research interests still focus on human-in-the-loop, force sensitivity and control, touch, and haptic interactions, believing a robot really is a robot because it physically manipulates the real world.
Friday, September 27, 2019 at 10:00am to 11:00am
Rogers Hall, 226
2000 SW Monroe Avenue, Corvallis, OR 97331
Dylan Jones
No recent activity