RoboLaunch: Come Explore Robotics!
Ever wondered what robotics is? Come explore the world of robotics with RoboLaunch. The initiative offers a series of talks and conversations from diverse pioneers through which you can explore robotics and how research/education can be fun!! The initiative introduces you to broad topics in robotics through talks and interactive workshops.
RISS RoboLaunch is a robotics outreach & broadening participation initiative, making robotics more accessible. Our RoboLaunch Discord Server aims to foster an inclusive global learning community, and we invite you to join us.
Learn More About the Upcoming 2023 Schedule
Launching 07/12/2023
| Presenter | Session Description | Date/Time | YouTube Link |
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| Tesca Fitzgerald Assistant Professor Yale University |
Dr. Fitzgerald, an assistant professor at Yale University, conducts research centered around interactive robot learning. She develops algorithms that allow a robot to structure and interpret its interactions with a human teacher in order to adapt its task knowledge to novel situations. Her work contributes toward a future of adaptive, collaborative robots. Dr. Fitzgerald did her postdoc at CMU with Henny Admoni, Reid Simmons, and Aaron Steinfeld. Before that, she completed her PhD at Georgia Tech, advised by Ashok Goel and Andrea Thomaz.
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07/12/2023 11:00 AM EDT
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| Aayush Bansal Roboticist formerly at META |
Dr. Bansal, a former roboticist researcher for Meta, aims to build artificial intelligence based on task-and-domain-agnostic exemplar representations learned in an unsupervised manner. He received his PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2020 and was part of the 2010 RISS cohort.
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07/26/2023 11:00 AM EDT
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| Sergio Sedas Professor, Business Consultant, and Creator EGADE Business School |
Dr. Sedas, a professor at EGADE Business school and the creator of Highly Valued Leader, works with leading managers and directors that seek to inspire and lead transformation, innovation and growth. Throughout his 30+-year career, he has founded and directed multiple high-tech companies that designed and built intelligent manufacturing solutions with robots for major companies in the automotive industry.
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09/20/2023 4:00 PM EDT
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| Oliver Kroemer Assistant Professor |
Oliver Kroemer is an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, where he directs the Intelligent Autonomous Manipulation Lab. His research focuses on developing algorithms and representations to enable robots to learn versatile manipulation skills over time. Before joining the CMU Robotics Institute in 2018, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Southern California (USC). He received his Masters and Bachelors degrees in engineering from the University of Cambridge in 2008. From 2009 to 2011, he was a Ph.D. student at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. In 2014, he defended his Ph.D. thesis at the Technische Universitaet Darmstadt and was a finalist for the 2015 Georges Giralt Ph.D. Award for the best robotics Ph.D. thesis in Europe. | 10/09/2023 4:00 PM EDT |  |
| Howie Choset Kavčić-Moura Professor of Computer Science Lu Li Project Scientist |
Howie Choset, a professor of robotics and co-director to the Biorobotics Lab at CMU, researches biologically inspired systems with Project Scientist Lu Li. The Biorobotics Lab is most known for its snake robots and other biologically inspired systems. They have impacted fields including surgery, manufacturing, on-orbit maintenance, recycling, autonomy, and search and rescue. Recently the lab has been contributing to robotic modularity, multi-agent planning, information-based search, and skill learning. | 10/10/2023 4:00 PM EDT |  |
| Zackory Erickson Assistant Professor |
Zackory Erickson is an Assistant Professor in The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where he leads the Robotic Caregiving and Human Interaction (RCHI) Lab. His research focuses on developing new robot learning, mobile manipulation, and sensing methods for physical human-robot interaction and healthcare. Zackory received his PhD in Robotics and M.S. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech and B.S. in Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse. | 10/12/2023 4:00 PM EDT |  |
| John M. Dolan Principal Systems Scientist |
John Dolan, a principal systems scientist at CMU and directory of the DRIVE Lab, conducts research on human-robot interaction to perform useful tasks. He applies modeling and control problems and effective human-machine interfaces to the sectors of autonomous driving, telesupervisory human-robot systems, and self-repairable task-dividing teams of exploratory robots. | 10/13/2023 4:00PM EDT |  |
| Kristina Monakhova Assistant Professor |
Kristina Monakhova is an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University, starting Fall 2024. Until then, she is a postdoctoral fellow at MIT working with Sixian You and George Barbastathis, and supported by the MIT Postdoctoral Fellowship for Engineering Excellence. She works on co-designing optics and algorithms to create better, smaller, and more capable cameras and microscopes. She obtained my PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from UC Berkeley with Laura Waller. During her PhD, she was affiliated with the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab and was supported by the NSF GRFP fellowship. My PhD dissertation was on Physics-Informed Machine Learning for Computational Imaging. Kristina was also a RISS scholar in 2014. | 10/16/2023 4:00 PM EDT |  |
| Zachary Manchester Assistant Professor |
Zachary Manchester is an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, where he directs the Robotic Exploration Lab. His goal is to enable robotic systems that can match or exceed the level of agility, efficiency, and robustness demonstrated by humans and animals, especially in challenging environments. His research focuses both on the development of new algorithms and hardware to bring these algorithms to life. Zachary obtained both his Bachelor and PhD from Cornell University in 2009 and 2015, respectively. Before joining Carnegie Mellon University, he was an Assistant Professor at Stanford University, a Posdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University and worked as an Aerospace Engineer at NASA. | 10/18/2023 4:00 PM EDT |  |
| Sebastian Scherer Associate Research Professor Wenshan Wang Systems Scientist |
Sebastian Scherer, an Associate Research Professor at CMU and director of the AirLab, researches advanced autonomy for robotic systems, primarily unmanned aircraft, with Systems Scientist Wenshan Wang. The AirLab focuses on enabling autonomy for unmanned aircraft to operate at low altitude in cluttered environments. The lab has shown the fastest and most tested obstacle avoidance on an Yamaha RMax, the first obstacle avoidance for micro aerial vehicles in natural environments, and the first and fastest automatic landing zone detection and landing on a full-size helicopter. Their work is not exclusive to aerial vehicles either as they explore learning-based approaches with rugged environments on a Yamaha Viking ATV. | 10/19/2023 4:00PM EDT |  |
