UNC-Charlotte’s Jing Xiao presents “Robotic and Haptic Manipulation” as part of the IRIM Robotics Seminar Series. The event will be held in the TSRB Banquet Hall from 12-1 p.m. and is open to the public.

Abstract

Autonomous manipulation remains one of the most important challenges for robots, especially in cluttered environments with uncertainty and unknowns. Haptic simulation of manipulation is highly desirable for virtual training, virtual prototyping, and human-robot interaction for telerobotic manipulation.  In this talk, I’ll introduce our related research work in robotic and haptic manipulation. In particular, autonomous grasping and inspection using a flexible arm such as an elephant trunk robot in cluttered and even unknown environments, appearance-based 3-D object recognition and 6-D pose estimation in cluttered environments where objects partially occlude one another, and haptic simulation of multi-contact interaction with both rigid and deformable objects. If time allows, I’ll also briefly introduce our work on real-time adaptive motion planning and compliant motion for assembly. 

Bio

Jing Xiao received her Ph.D. degree in Computer, Information, and Control Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is a professor of computer science in the College of Computing and Informatics (CCI) at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is also the site director of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC) on Robots and Sensors for the Human Well-being. She served as the Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Programs of CCI for five years (1/2008-12/2012).  She is the recipient of the 2015 CCI Outstanding Faculty Research Award. Xiao served as the program director of the Robotics and Human Augmentation Program at the U.S. National Science Foundation for two and half years (8/1998-12/2000). Her research spans robotics, haptics, and intelligent systems, with a focus on robotic manipulation, compliant motion for assembly, real-time adaptive motion planning, and haptic rendering of multi-contact interactions. She has recently co-authored a monograph Haptic Rendering for Simulation of Fine Manipulation (Springer), and her work has resulted in more than 130 publications in major robotics conferences, journals, and book chapters, and one patent. Xiao is an IEEE Fellow, and she has been elected twice as an administrative committee member of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) and has started serving as the vice president for Member Activities of RAS for her second two-year term.