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UID:0-5563@eng.ufl.edu
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20230202T124500
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20230202T134500
DTSTAMP:20251201T210236Z
URL:https://www.eng.ufl.edu/news-events/events/candidate-seminar-relationa
 l-affordance-learning-for-robot-manipulation/
SUMMARY:Candidate Seminar - Relational Affordance Learning for Robot Manip
 ulation
DESCRIPTION:Relational Affordance Learning for Robot Manipulation\nThursday
 \, February 2\, 2023\, at 12:50 pm\nLocation: In-Person MAE-A\, Room 303\n
 David Held\nAssistant Professor\, Carnegie Mellon University\, Robotics In
 stitute\nDirector\, RPAD lab: Robots Perceiving And Doing\nAbstract\nRobot
 s today are typically confined to interacting with rigid\, opaque objects 
 with known object models. However\, the objects in our daily lives are oft
 en non-rigid\, can be transparent or reflective\, and are diverse in shape
  and appearance. I argue that to enhance the capabilities of robots\, we s
 hould develop perception methods that estimate what robots need to know to
  interact with the world. Specifically\, I will present novel perception m
 ethods that estimate “relational affordances”: task-specific geometric
  relationships between objects that allow a robot to determine what action
 s it needs to take to complete a task. These estimated relational affordan
 ces can enable robots to perform complex tasks such as manipulating cloth\
 , articulated objects\, grasping transparent and reflective objects\, and 
 other manipulation tasks\, generalizing to unseen objects in a category an
 d unseen object configurations. By reasoning about relational affordances\
 , we can achieve robust performance on difficult robot manipulation tasks.
 \nBiography\nDavid Held is an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon Unive
 rsity in the Robotics Institute and is the director of the RPAD lab: Robot
 s Perceiving And Doing. His research focuses on perceptual robot learning\
 , i.e.\, developing new methods at the intersection of robot perception an
 d planning for robots to learn to interact with novel\, perceptually chall
 enging\, and deformable objects. Prior to coming to CMU\, David was a post
 -doctoral researcher at U.C. Berkeley\, and he completed his Ph.D. in Comp
 uter Science at Stanford University. David also has a B.S. and M.S. in Mec
 hanical Engineering from MIT. David is a recipient of the Google Faculty R
 esearch Award in 2017 and the NSF CAREER Award in 2021.\nFaculty Host: Kri
 sty Boyer
CATEGORIES:Faculty Search
LOCATION:MAE-A Room 303\, 939 Sweetwater Drive\, Gainesville\, FL\, 32611\,
  United States
GEO:29.643814;-82.34865
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