Past Projects

I've been involved in a few project over time. My most recent work is at Enway GmbH, in Berlin. For information on work at Enway, I direct you to their website, https://enway.ai/en/

Prior to that my main project in my Ph.D. work were the following:

1. Robotic Assistance with Dressing using Simulation-Based Optimization (July 8, 2015 - July 2018)

The abstract of the project reads as follows:

The aging population, rising healthcare costs, and shortage of healthcare workers in the United States create a pressing need for affordable and effective personalized care. Physical disabilities due to illness, injury, or aging can result in people having difficulty dressing themselves, and the healthcare community has found that dressing is an important task for independent living. The goal of this research is to develop techniques that enable robots to assist people with putting on clothing, which is a challenging task for robots due to the complexities of cloth, the human body, and robots. A key aspect of this research is that robots will discover how they can help people by quickly trying out many options in a computer simulation. Success in this research would make progress towards robots capable of giving millions of people greater independence and a higher quality of life. In addition to healthcare applications, this research will result in better computer tools for fruitful collaborations between robots and humans in other scenarios.

This research uses efficient physics simulation and optimization tools to substantially automate the design of assistive robots for dressing. The approach considers the robot to be an assistive device that a human learns to use. The system optimizes the assistive robot based on what a particular human with impairments is capable of doing comfortably, rather than what he/she typically does. This approach automatically optimizes personalized assistive controllers for a particular user and article of clothing via simulation. Due to frequent line-of-sight occlusion and the importance of controlling forces applied to the user's body, controllers that use data-driven haptic perception are trained using simulation-generated data. These capabilities critically depend on advancements in the efficient physical simulation of cloth, robots, and humans, as well as the discovery of appropriate human motions for a given assistive robot. This work advances the state of the art in assistive robotics, haptic perception, human modeling, optimization and efficient physical simulation. Evaluation of the system is in simulation and in the real world with test rigs that model aspects of dressing, a PR2 robot dressing a humanoid robot, and a PR2 dressing able-bodied participants with restricted motion.

2. Rehabilitation Engineering Research Centers (RERC) Program on Technologies to Support Aging-in-Place for People with Long-Term DisabilitiesRehabilitation Engineering Research Center, National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (Oct 2013 - July 2018)

The project is described as follows:

The Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Technologies to Support Aging-in-Place for People with Long-Term Disabilities (RERC TechSAge) is a collaborative grant center based at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Founded in 2013, TechSAge features multidisciplinary research, development, and training projects that are dedicated to understanding the needs of, and developing supportive technologies for, people aging with long-term disabilities. This center is supported by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR).

The mission of the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Technologies to Support Aging-in-Place for People with Long-Term Disabilities (RERC TechSAge) is:

- to support and empower people with chronic conditions and long-term impairments to age-in-place

- through increasing knowledge about, availability of, and access to effective design and technologies

- that enable individuals to sustain independence; maintain health; engage safely in basic activities at home and in the community; and fully participate in society.

3. Multi-Contact Variable Compliance Manipulation in Extreme Clutter, DARPA-M3 (Jan 2012 - Mar 2014)

A goal of this project was to develop new foundational capabilities for robot manipulation. We pushed the idea that robot-environment contact is inevitable and desirable with proper sensors and controller.

The abstract of the project is as follows:

We have developed new foundational capabilities for robot manipulation that assume contact across the entire manipulator is inevitable and desirable. Our approach makes use of compliant actuation and full-body force-sensing skin. We developed force-sensitive skin, low-level control algorithms, mid-level control algorithms, and planners that enable robots to reach to locations in extreme clutter, such as foliage and rubble, while haptically generating 3D maps of their surroundings. We have performed experiments with software simulated robots with skin, a hardware-in-the-loop system that simulates skin for a real robot, and real robots with real force-sensing skin.

As part of this project I worked primarily on developing and creating tactile sensors for the whole arm of a robot., on understanding objects through contact, and on a dynamic model predictive controller that uses a dynamic model of the robot arm to control contact forces while moving through unknown cluttered environments.