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GRASP on Robotics: Russ Tedrake, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “Planning on Graphs of Convex Sets”
October 29, 2021 @ 10:30 am - 11:45 am
*This was a HYBRID Event with in-person attendance in Wu & Chen Auditorium and Virtual attendance via Zoom Webinar
ABSTRACT
Motivated by the challenging problems in planning and control through contact, our group has been working to connect more deeply the motion planning formulations we often use in robotics with a different lineage of algorithms and results in combinatorial optimization. What we’ve found surprised me: I feel that we’ve been formulating our mixed-integer motion planning problems incorrectly, and that there are better formulations that can lead to dramatically faster solve times and tighter convex relaxations. I’d like to tell you that story, through the lens of optimization-based collision-free motion planning. This is joint work with Tobia Marcucci, Jack Umenberger, and Pablo Parrilo. I’ll also briefly describe a few other ongoing projects in robotic manipulation, and promise to show some robot videos.
Presenter
Russ Tedrake is the Toyota Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, and Aero/Astro, and he is a member of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL). He is also the Vice President of Robotics Research at Toyota Research Institute (TRI). He received a B.S.E. in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan in 1999, and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2004. Dr. Tedrake is the Director of the MIT CSAIL Center for Robotics and was the leader of MIT’s entry in the DARPA Robotics Challenge. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the MIT Jerome Saltzer Award for undergraduate teaching, the DARPA Young Faculty Award in Mathematics, the 2012 Ruth and Joel Spira Teaching Award, and was named a Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellow. His research has been recognized with numerous conference best paper awards, including ICRA, Robotics: Science and Systems, Humanoids, Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control, as well as the inaugural best paper award from the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Whole-Body Control.