The Michigan Robotics Newsletter, Winter 2019
Welcome to ISSUE 4 of the Michigan Robotics Newsletter, an easy to skim summary of what's happening in the University of Michigan Robotics Institute community (and full of how we try to practice our values). Also, for this winter issue, we've put together a Robotics Gift Guide.
Research
Matt Romano, Yuxin Chen, Owen Wilson, and Ella Atkins published research on using an autonomous drone to nail down roofing shingles.
Sabrina Benge, Maani Ghaffari Jadidi, Ruikun Luo and X. Jessie Yang are working to put a robot docent in the U-M Museum of Art.
Ross Hartley, PhD alumni, began writing a series on using factor graphs for legged robot state estimation for GTSAM.
Lionel Robert and X. Jessie Yang presented research on what human personality traits we want to see in automated cars.
Congratulations
Jeremy Castagno, Prince Kuevor, Matt Romano, and Prashin Sharma were one of three winners of the National Security Innovation Network's "Into the Dataverse" hackathon.
Ruikun Luo won the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society's Student Presenter Award for a paper on teleoperation of unmanned vehicles.
Chad Jenkins was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Look/Listen
Watch the video of Matt Romano's (very well done) drone nailing down shingles.
Emily Mower Provost talked AI and mental health at Friday Night AI, put on by the AI Lab.
Jana Pavlasek was profiled in latest Diversity in Action magazine.
Jason Corso's Voxel51, which uses AI for video insights, is showcased as a TechCrunch Disrupt Top Pick.
Hear about Ella Atkins and her lab's work putting AI in aviation in this podcast.
Jessy Grizzle presented "Mathematics and Learning for Agile and Dynamic Bipedal Locomotion" at MIT.
Edwin Olson presented "Communication Constrained Multi-Robot Communication," including his Pac-Man competitor, for ARC.
Ruikun Luo talks about the difficulties in designing a robot museum docent on Michigan Radio.
Dimitra Panagou presented "The Astronet: A Human-Centric Network of Free-Flying Space Co-Robots" at Saturday Morning Physics.
Check out a feature on drones and wildfires, about A2Sys Lab's win at the AFRL and DSTL Firehack hackathon.
Past events
The Robotics Graduate Student Council practiced using the force(-feedback?) before Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra's Star Wars show.
Robert Gregg dressed up for Halloween.
In collaboration with Littler and the Association for Advancing Automation, we held an AI and Robotics Symposium.
For #GivingBlueday, the University's annual donation appeal, Robotics faculty and staff matched any donations to robotics with donations to U-M's Women in Science and Engineering program.
Facilities
Matias del Campo and Alexa Carlson's Robot Playground is taking shape after it's AI-aided design.
Qualisys installed 12 more motion capture cameras at M-Air, for a total of 30.
A few more sneak peek photos from the Ford Robotics Building, before opening soon.
If you have comments on this email or submissions for the next, please send them to dnewms@umich.edu.
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