Event

BBI Speaker Series: Choreographic Abstractions for Embodied Design of Heterogeneous Robotic Behavior

Thursday, April 7, 2016
3:30 p.m.-4:30 p.m.
1103 Bioscience Research Building
Bijan DaBell
bdabell@umd.edu

Speaker: Dr. Amy Laviers, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 

"Choreographic Abstractions for Embodied Design of Heterogeneous Robotic Behavior"

See more about Dr. Laviers: YouTube

Abstract: How do you get a robot to do the disco? Or perform a cheerleading routine? These acts require a quantitative understanding of two distinct movement behaviors and pose new problems for the high-level control of robots. The ability to easily create and control movement programs tailored to a specific task or context by untrained operators is key to bringing robots out of specialized roles for high volume manufacturing processes and into more rapidly changing scenarios, working alongside human operators. Thus, abstractions for robotic control need to align with the embodied experience of human movement. This talk will discuss the use of Laban/Barteinieff Movement Studies (LBMS), a framework and taxonomy for movement, as a formal, embodied inroad to this experience and to facilitate the production of diverse robotic behaviors. In this talk, a `behavior’ will be defined by a set of movement primitives that are scaled and sequenced differently in different instances. Methods for scaling and sequencing of movement primitives using optimal control and linear temporal logic (LTL) and for extracting primitives automatically from human movement using inverse optimal control will be discussed. These methods will be applied to real robotic platforms and presented in a context that motivates the fundamental value of high-level abstractions that allow for embodied design of a wide array of robotic behavior.