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GRASP Seminar Series: Fall 2008
November 14th, 11:00 a.m., Wu & Chen Auditorium, Levine Hall (3330 Walnut Street)
Oliver Brock
University of Massachusetts
"Robots for the Real World - Towards Autonomous Mobile Manipulation"
Abstract: There is increasing interest, activity, and urgency to build robots
capable of performing manipulation tasks with human-like competency in
human environments. I will present our work towards this objective in
the areas of motion planning, perception, and manipulation. Our work
focuses on challenges that arise when scope and complexity of tasks
cannot be conceived by a programmer a priori but instead have to be
assessed and addressed by the robot during task execution in an
autonomous fashion. I will conjecture that to achieve this level of
competency and autonomy, we - as a research community - may have to
change our ways, slightly.
Biography: Oliver Brock is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He received his Computer Science Diploma in 1993 from the Technical University of Berlin and his Masters and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1994 and 2000, respectively. He was a co-founder and CTO of an Internet startup called AllAdvantage.com. He also held post-doc positions at Rice University and Stanford University. At the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Oliver is affiliated with the Robotics and Biology Laboratory and the Computational Biology Laboratory. His research focuses on Autonomous Mobile Manipulation and the application of robotic algorithms to problems in Structural Molecular Biology.
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