University of Texas at Austin’s Luis Sentis presents “Humanoids of the Future” 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

As the world’s population lives longer, human-centered robotics emerges as a solution for the assistance, augmentation, and representation of humans to their comfort, productivity, and health. In this context, the Human Centered Robotics Lab studies key problems in mobility and manipulation of humanoid robots. In the first part of the talk, I will describe our work with the Office of Naval Research on endowing agile and compliant physical capabilities to bipedal robots. In particular, I will focus on the performance analysis of the whole-body operational space control framework during locomotion. In the second part of the talk, I will describe our work with NASA on physical human-robot interaction involving collisions between humans and mobile platforms and cooperative behaviors in rough terrains. Finally, I will comment on our work on building high performance actuators and software middleware for NASA’s Valkyrie humanoid robot.

Bio

Luis Sentis is an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his Ph.D and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University where he was also a postdoctoral fellow. He was a La Caixa Foundation Fellow during his Stanford years. He holds a B.S. (Honors Thesis) degree in Telecommunications and Electronics Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC). Before Stanford, he worked in Silicon Valley as a control systems engineer where he programmed Fanuc Robots for the clean room automation industry.

In Austin, Sentis leads the Human Centered Robotics Laboratory, an experimental laboratory with two research fellows, six Ph.D. students, one M.S. student, several undergraduate students, and two humanoid robots. He was UT Austin's lead for the DARPA Robotics Challenge with NASA Johnson Space Center during 2012-2013. His research focuses on safe physical human robot interactions, whole-body operational space control of human centered robots, high performance series elastic actuators, mobile manipulation in rough terrains, and agile bipedal locomotion. The Office of Naval Research, NASA, DARPA, Willow Garage, and AAA Electronics have funded his research. More recently, he was awarded the NASA Elite Team Award.