The Michigan Robotics Newsletter, Fall 2020
Welcome to the Michigan Robotics Newsletter, an easy to skim summary of what's happening in the University of Michigan Robotics Institute community – a community, with its web of researchers and common values, featured in the latest Michigan Engineer magazine, along with sneak peeks of the new building.
Research
A handful of students and professors took part in RSS 2020: get the summary of Michigan attendees here.
Many, many more are participating in IROS 2020: an even bigger summary of Michigan attendees here.
Toby Elery, Siavash Rezazadeh, Christopher Nesler, and Bobby Gregg published a paper on their "Powered Knee–Ankle Prosthesis With High-Torque, Low-Impedance Actuators."
Na Du is first author on a paper that evaluates the effects of cognitive load and takeover time during automated driving.
Sam Nason is first author on a paper with Cindy Chestek that details work of tuning in to a subset of brainwaves that reduces power requirements of neural interfaces while improving accuracy.
Connor Esterwood and Lionel Robert presented an overview of personality in healthcare human robot interaction for the Conference on Human Agent Interaction.
Abdon Pena-Francesch published a paper on stealth microbots that evade the immune system.
Hebert Azevedo-Sa published a paper on context-adaptive management of drivers' trust in automated vehicles.
Congratulations
Zhen Zeng and Chad Jenkins' paper, Semantic Linking Maps for Active Visual Object Search, won Best Cognitive Robotics Paper at ICRA 2020!
Talia Moore will join Mechanical Engineering as an assistant professor and Robotics as a core faculty member starting in January.
Damen Provost is the recipient of a portion of a gift from the Offutt Charitable Trust.
Robotics 101: Computational Linear Algebra, a pilot undergraduate course, began this semester with 10 students from Morehouse and Spelman Colleges.
Jason Corso will become director of Steven's Institute for Artificial Intelligence in January.
Bobby Gregg and Elliott Rouse received a grant to expand open source control for a robotic prosthetic leg.
The MAVRIC team, including X. Jessie Yang, Dawn Tilbury, and Lionel Robert, won the 2019 Vincent Bendix Automotive Electronics Engineering Award by SAE for this paper.
Welcome our new Research & Development Engineer, Jonathan Ward!
Look/Listen/Read
The How to Do Grad School podcast, hosted by Nosa Edoimioya, kicked off with a few familiar faces as guests. Listen on Apple podcasts or Spotify.
Check out research from several labs around the Institute in the 2020 Lab Showcase.
Chad Jenkins writes in VentureBeat: "Before we put $100 billion into AI..."
Watch Yu-Chi Lin's PhD defense: Learning for Humanoid Multi-Contact Navigation Planning.
Watch Cassie take on a 22 degree slope.
Watch Ella Atkins and Glen Haggin discuss the Qualisys motion capture system at M-Air.
Watch Manikandasriram S.R. give an overview of robot vision for an RSS Pioneers talk, and Patrick Holmes' Pioneers talk on safe trajectory design.
Watch Chad Jenkins' "My Apology to Mr. Robert Williams" from the RSS Good Citizens of Robotics Research, and Ella Atkins' "Fostering Diversity of Thought Despite Legacy Expectations".
AAAS interviews Lionel Robert on the future of human robot interaction.
Watch Bobby Gregg present at CMU remotely on his research of wearable robots for human locomotion.
Past events
The new Mars Yard got some early use.
Robotics Graduate Student Council held a trivia night, where many learned you may want Kimberly Mann on your team.
Robotics continued with its virtual Town Hall series bringing together students and faculty to discuss important issues in the community. Summaries are available here.
If you have comments on this email or submissions for the next, please send them to dnewms@umich.edu.
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