Developmental Programming and Distributed Robot Control

August 13, 2007
Roderic Grupen | UMass Amherst

The Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics at UMass Amherst is studying how sensors and effectors can be recruited into working robot systems using an idea we call the “control basis.” This framework provides a convenient representation for combining distributed resources into integrated machines that can dissociate once their task is completed. Perhaps surprisingly, we feel this representation has a lot to do with the cognitive organization of development and dexterous behavior in biological systems as well.

This talk introduces the control basis and creates a computational account of developmental processes that can be used to help robots write programs for themselves and other robots. I will demonstrate some of the ideas using examples of control programs for distributed sensor systems, dexterous manipulators, and mobile manipulators. I will conclude by anticipating how such systems and programming paradigms can be used to construct robot systems for healthcare in residential settings with examples we have constructed at UMass.

Speaker Details

Rod Grupen has degrees in Physics, Mechanical Engineering, and Computer Science. He has worked for a time as a Design Engineer on energy systems and has been on the faculty at the University of Massachusetts Amherst since 1988 where he is a Professor and the Director of the Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics.Professor Grupen’s work integrates signal processing, control, dynamical systems, learning, and development to build intelligent robot systems. A central focus is controllers for dexterous machines and mobile manipulators. Grupen’s papers discuss grasping and manipulation, hierarchical learning methods for sensory and motor processes, implicit representations for control knowledge, redundant systems and multi-objective control, learning and control methods for dexterous machines, mobile manipulators, and human-robot interfaces. His current work is supported by grants from the NSF, ARO, NASA, ONR, and Microsoft. Dr. Grupen currently serves as Associate Editor for AI in Engineering Design and Manufacturing (AIEDAM), Co-Editor in Chief on the Journal of Robotics and Autonomous Systems and serves on many assorted international program committees. He co-founded the Embedded Systems instructional laboratory in which students from many disciplines learn about computing in the context of integrated devices. Rod received the University of Massachusetts Outstanding Teacher Award in 2000 and is the author of an upcoming book entitled “The Developmental Organization of Dexterous Robot Behavior,” MIT Press, Spring 2008.