A new knee exo, using AI in forestry to impact climate change, and the GelSlim 4.0 visuotactile sensor
Plus a quadruped helps in the garden
Welcome to the Michigan Robotics newsletter, a summary of what’s happening in the University of Michigan Robotics community.
In a new milestone, robotics graduate students logged over 1,000 hours(!) of community service last year. We celebrate the 32 students who have recently been named Robotics Outreach Ambassadors, and everyone who contributes to their communities.
We also extend our congratulations to this year’s Robotics Department Alumni Merit Award winner Acshi Haggenmiller: watch Acshi discuss his work at Gaia AI using AI in forestry to help mitigate climate change.
Research
Versatile knee exo for safer lifting
In a Science Robotics article, Nikhil Divekar, Gray Thomas, Avani Yerva, Hannah Frame, and Robert Gregg present a knee exoskeleton controller that automatically modulates virtual springs, dampers, and gravity and inertia compensation to assist squatting, walking, and climbing and descending stairs.
Enhancing humanoid robot actuator design in new $1.2M project
The grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) will fund work to enhance the design of humanoid legged robots, enabling their use in demanding situations such as warehouse labor and emergency response. Yanran Ding, the principal investigator, and Robert Gregg, the co-principal investigator, will lead researchers in developing a new framework for designing energy-efficient robots by focusing on a specialized type of motors: Quasi-Direct-Drive (QDD) actuators with Unidirectional Parallel Spring (UPS) mechanisms.
Computational Symmetry and Learning for Robotics
Discussing structures that arise from combining symmetry, geometry, and learning in various foundational problems in robotics, Chien Erh (Cynthia) Lin and Tzu-Yuan (Justin) Lin present work on behalf of Maani Ghaffari at IROS 2024.
Is it Meaningful to Work with A Robot?
This study on restaurant employees aims to identify key job characteristics impacting employee attitudes toward automation and contribute to supporting human workers in the era of automation, from Samia Bhatti, Aarushi Jain, and Lionel Robert.
RoPotter: Toward Robotic Pottery and Deformable Object Manipulation with Structural Priors
A robotic system capable of continuously deforming clay on a pottery wheel is trained through behavior cloning polices with reduced representation and mechanics-based priors to simplify the skill-learning problem, from Uksang Yoo, Adam Hung, Jonathan Francis, Jean Oh, and Jeffrey Ichnowski.
Exploring the trade-off between deep-learning and explainable models for brain-machine interfaces
Researchers designed a BMI decoder based on KalmanNet, an extension of the KF that augments its operation with recurrent neural networks to compute the Kalman gain, from a team including Luis Cubillos, Anne Draelos, and Cynthia Chestek.
The authors explain how the structure of traffic behavior could be effectively captured by lower-dimensional abstractions that emphasize critical interaction relationships, from Christoforos Mavrogiannis, Jonathan DeCastro, and Siddhartha Srinivasa.
Quantifying Aleatoric and Epistemic Dynamics Uncertainty via Local Conformal Calibration
This work introduces a conformal prediction based approach to account for uncertainty in a theoretically-grounded way: the method calibrates the uncertainty estimates provided by Gaussian models to generate probabilistically-valid prediction regions of the system’s state, no matter the initial model accuracy, from Luís Marques and Dmitry Berenson.
Watch and listen
Sheng Zhong (Johnson) presents work on the challenge of tasks where objects to be manipulated are occluded by the environment, other objects, or themselves.
Andrea Sipos presents research on the uncertainty of in-hand object pose for objects grasped by a robotic system, including introducing the GelSlim 4.0 sensor, an open-source, powerful visuotactile sensor.
Alyssa Emigh, adjunct lecturer and makerspace supervisor in the Ford Robotics Building at the University of Michigan, knows all about animatronics, puppetry, and water jet cutting and a whole lot more. Earlier this year, Alyssa Emigh earned a Michigan Engineering Staff Excellence Award for all that she does.
Toyota Research Institute and Amazon help fund a one-of-a-kind collaborative teaching model that partners with Minority-Serving Institutions. Read more about the Distributed Teaching Collaboratives that aim to bridge gaps in both workforce needs for industry and educational access for students from diverse backgrounds.
Wami Ogunbi speaks at TEDxDetroit on how our technology reflects our values in “How to Prevent the Robot Apocalypse.”
Making the Robots People Actually Need
Chad Jenkins talk to
about why he expects humanoid robot growth to increase, and about how and engineers need to listen to non-roboticists, and disappointments when a robot meets the real world in the podcast for .Read
College robots, tweaked with Scratch, inspire younger students
Brody Riopelle and a team of interns including Tyler Simon of Georgia State University, Jacob Jack of Morehouse College, and Kori Kobylak of Berea College spent the summer turning the MBot–the robot that our undergraduate and graduate students use in their courses–into one that grade school students can quickly start exploring by using the graphical coding of Scratch.
Community-powered interactive robotics art project
A group of Robotics staff led the creation of an interactive community art project. The final piece is a grid of art boxes, produced by different members of our robotics community, which offer an eight-inch square view into their own work with robotics. The art boxes are equipped with an Arduino and servos, allowing the creators to add some motion and light into their dioramas.
Data Curation: The Beast Behind Every AI Model
Jason Corso digs into describing data curation, why it is not outsourceable, and the challenges of data curation, such as bias and difficulty.
Congrats
Chad Jenkins receives Richard A. Tapia Award
Calling it the “greatest accomplishment of his career,” Jenkins was honored at the CMD-IT/Tapia Conference in September.
Robert Gregg bestowed with Rackham Faculty Recognition Award
“When others duck and run, Bobby steps forward. This is true at Michigan, as well nationally in his professional societies.”
Katie Skinner receives 2025 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award
The program aims to award those who show exceptional promise for doing creative research: Skinner’s project is titled “Active Perception and Learning for Adaptive Underwater Surveying and Automatic Target Recognition.”
Trinh Huynh named Petar and Zdravka Zdravkovski Scholar
Awarded by CEW+, the scholarship supports graduate students in STEM fields and architecture.
Parting shot
