Science and Engineering in Robotic Competitions

Speaker: Professor Daniel Lee 

Host Faculty: Professor Zhong-Ping Jiang

Abstract

There have been a number of well-publicized competitions held in the robotics community in recent years. I will review their goals and objectives, and discuss what the impact of these competitions has been on researchers across the world. In particular, I will describe some of the innovations in perception, planning, and motor control that my group has developed in response to the real-world challenges presented by these competitions. Examples with autonomous ground, humanoid, and aerial robots will be shown.

About the Speaker

Daniel D. Lee is currently the Evan Thompson Term Chair, Raymond S. Markowitz Faculty Fellow, and Associate Professor in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his B.A. in Physics from Harvard University in 1990, and his Ph.D. in Condensed Matter Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1995. Before coming to Penn, he was a researcher at Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, in the Theoretical Physics and Biological Computation departments. He has received the NSF Career award and the University Lindback award for distinguished teaching; he was a fellow of the Hebrew University Institute of Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, a foreign affiliate of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and has helped organize the US-Japan National Academy of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering symposium. As part of the GRASP Laboratory and University Transportation Center at Penn, his group focuses on understanding general computational principles in neurobiological systems and on applying that knowledge to build better robotic systems.