Datasets for disaster drones, a new 10,000 gallon research water tank, and low-cost stroke rehabilitation devices
plus this year's robot parade honoring graduating students
Welcome to the Michigan Robotics newsletter, a summary of what’s happening in the University of Michigan Robotics community.
Did you know we hold two seminar series throughout the Fall and Winter? Recordings are often made available as well:
Robotics Pathways and Careers Speaker Series
Distinguished roboticists share their career journeys and insights into the field. This series aims to highlight the many paths to robotics and what students can do with a robotics degree.
Explores cutting-edge robotics research featuring leading researchers and experts from academia and industry presenting their latest work and findings.
Now the news.
Research
PHOTO GALLERY: Look into the newest effort to expand rural health care access
Jason Corso is leading a portion of an ARPA-H project that seeks to address a growing gap in rural health care: over the past 10 years, more than 100 hospitals in primarily rural areas have closed, with at least another 600 – or 30% of all rural hospitals – at risk of shutting down soon due to lack of funding.
Teams seeking to equip medical generalists with AI-guided task support met up last month to demonstrate their research so far, such as ultrasound and wound care dressing guided by computer vision. Read more on the project.
Customizing Visual-Language Foundation Models for Multi-modal Anomaly Detection and Reasoning
Winning the IEEE CSCWD Best Student Paper Award, this paper demonstrates how combining expert knowledge with visual-language AI unlocks anomaly detection in production and manufacturing using smart prompts and reference images, no matter the industry.
Release Chamber Enables Suction Cup to Delaminate and Harvest Fluid
Winning the IEEE RoboSoft Best Paper Award in Benchmarking and Reproducibility, as well as nominated for a Best Student Paper Award, the team of Xiangyun Bu, Yihao Geng, Siyuan Yin, Liyan Luo, Cameron Aubin, and Talia Moore designed a suction cup with a secondary release chamber embedded inside.
Security Robot Power and Acceptance: Exploring French and Raven’s Five Forms of Power
Selected for Best Late Breaking Report Award Honorable Mention at HRI 2025, this paper demonstrates the influence of perceived power on public acceptance and offers design guidelines for enhancing the acceptance of security robots by emphasizing expertise and legitimate authority while minimizing coercive tactics, from Xin Ye and Lionel Robert.
Sexual and Emotional Intimacy with Robots: A Brief Review
Interactive robots foster closer human-robot connections, but emotional and sexual intimacy are often conflated with other traits. This paper from Annette Masterson, Shiyu Li, and Lionel Robert provides a framework for understanding intimacy with physical robots.
From A to Ω: Pixel Art with a Mobile Robot
For the Arts in Robotics session of ICRA, Jeeho Ahn and Christoforos Mavrogiannis develop an autonomous system that can create room-scale pixel art by guiding a mobile robot to rearrange a set of pixels via pushing. Behind this work is…
ReloPush: Multi-object Rearrangement in Confined Spaces with a Nonholonomic Mobile Robot Pusher
the tech behind the pixel art above: push-based multi-object rearrangement planning using a nonholonomically constrained mobile robot (also Jeeho Ahn and Christoforos Mavrogiannis).
Artificial intelligence voice gender, gender role congruity, and trust in automated vehicles
This work explores how ingrained societal biases influence our perception of automated vehicles and how we might design more trustworthy and inclusive AV systems, from Qiaoning Zhang, X. Jessie Yang, and Lionel Robert.
Implicit Communication in Human-Robot Collaborative Transport
When humans and robots work together to carry heavy objects, they don't need to talk to coordinate - they can communicate through subtle movements and forces. Elvin Yang and Christoforos Mavrogiannis present a system that lets robots "read" these implicit signals, making teamwork feel more natural and efficient.
From Somayeh Molaei, Lionel Robert, and Nikola Banovic, this paper highlights how simple yet engaging interactions can foster trust and curiosity, paving the way for a future where humans feel more comfortable with self-driving technology.
Watch
Trinh Huynh, recent master’s graduate, has a message for those interested in robotics from maybe not the most robotics-related backgrounds: "If you are eager to get it, you will achieve it."
Researchers including Cale Colony, Sydney Belt, Xiaoxiao Du, and Jim Lollar, are developing a project to improve disaster recovery and search-and-rescue efforts by deploying drones to identifying distress signals from people in need.
Devansh Agrawal presents a cohesive architecture for the entire autonomy stack, ensuring that, under specific and verifiable assumptions, a robot can execute its mission while respecting safety constraints.
Advaith Sethuraman details new methods for underwater robots to conduct autonomous survey, reacquisition, and inspection missions, including an open-source dataset and benchmark for shipwreck segmentation in sonar imagery.
Joey Wilson presents new methods that combine machine learning and probabilistic approaches to help autonomous robots build detailed, reliable maps from sparse and uncertain data, enabling better decision-making and navigation in complex, real-world environments.
Cameron Aubin taught ROB 310 this past term, and students worked together to create a plethora of smart machines that sensed, signaled, and even jammed.
On Busan English Broadcasting Foundation's Morning Wave in Busan, Lionel Robert talks about the rise of the bipedal robots, the world's first humanoid robot half marathon, and if these humanoids will take our human jobs.
한국어로
Economy Chosen interviewed Elliott Rouse on the Open-Source Leg project, a lower-limb bionic prosthetic, now used by a community of over 500 researchers across more than 30 research institutions in five countries.
em português
A Professora Patricía Alves-Oliveira está a estudar a autenticidade de obras de arte co-criadas por um artista e um robô.
Read
New robotics research water tank to enable advanced marine autonomy
A new 10,000 gallon water tank at the University of Michigan will help researchers design, build, and test a variety of autonomous underwater systems that could help robots map lakes and oceans and conduct inspections of ships and bridges.
The open-source AI debate: Why selective transparency poses a serious risk
Jason Corso writes in VentureBeat on what it means to be trustworthy in the world of AI.
A paralyzed man flew a drone with his mind. How UM researchers are opening virtual doors
Cindy Chestek discusses the work that can now be done as we get to interaction at the level of neurons.
Science Imitates Life: Bioinspired Robots
Talia Moore spoke with the Paulson Institute in an article that explores how bioinspired robots advance the field of biology and help preserve biodiversity.
Congrats
At IEEE RoboSoft, "Adaptive Self-sealing Soft Robotic Face Mask with Particle Jamming" was selected as a Best Student Paper Finalist, from Yatin Shankar Narayanan, Yilin Ma, Brent Gillespie, Mark Draelos, and Xiaonan Sean Huang.
At ICRA 2025, "Origami-Inspired Soft Robotic Arm: A Modular Platform for Manipulation” won the Best Poster Award at the workshop on Multi-Stable and Origami-based Soft Robots, from Jiyang Wang, Youchen You, Xinqi Zhang, Haobo Fang, Jiaqi Wang, and Xiaonan Sean Huang.
Also at ICRA 2025, “Painted Heart Beats,” a co-painting robot, won the HRI Award for Arts & Robotics, from Emily Wu, Rishad Hasan, Cindy Yang, Angshu Adhya, Hana Ichikawa, Jessica Li, David Ho, Mrunmayee Jere, Longzhen Yuan, Abhishek Narula, and Patricía Alves-Oliveira.
Andrew Seelhoff and Samantha Staudinger both awarded NSF Graduate Research Fellowships.
Ryan Posh, postdoctoral research fellow in Robert Gregg's lab, was awarded The National Institutes of Health F32–Ruth L. Kirschstein Postdoctoral Individual National Research Service Award.
In-pipe locomotion challenge robot from the UMPlumber team. At RoboSoft 2025, Nilay Roy Choudhury and Zexiong Chen, members of the UMPlumber team, came in 2nd place in the in-pipe locomotion challenge.
Thomas Augenstein was awarded the 2025 Towner Prize for Outstanding PhD Research: watch and read more about Tom’s work in creating low-cost devices for stroke rehabilitation.
Parting shot
Our annual robot parade for commencement honored this year’s graduates. See the video on Instagram, Youtube, or LinkedIn.