Sethu Vijayakumar
Thu 14 Jan 2016, 12:45 - 13:45
4.31/33

If you have a question about this talk, please contact: Steph Smith (ssmith32)

Shared Autonomy: Promises and Challenges

The next generation of robots are going to work much more closely with humans, other robots and interact significantly with the environment around it. As a result, the key paradigms are shifting from isolated decision making systems to one that involves sharing control -- with significant autonomy devolved to the RAS systems; and end-users in the loop making only high level decisions.

The key questions is: while the robots are ready to share control, what is the optimal trade-off between autonomy and control that we are comfortable with?

I will talk about research from our group on variable impedance optimisation and how, in conjunction with novel actuator design and topology based representations, we are pushing the boundaries of shared, interactive control for robots and prosthetic devices. I will attempt to show you a live demo of shared control in an upper limb prosthetic device and also talk about our plans for the Space Robotics Challenge and Active Prosthesis testing.