Autonomy by Composition
Presented by Professor Daniel E. Koditschek
Alfred Fitler Moore Professor of Electrical and Systems Engineering , University of Pennsylvania
I will review decades of effort by my students and collaborators that aims to achieve robot architectures capable of autonomous work at useful tasks in varied environments by developing a systematic method for behavioral composition. Twenty years after inventing the first legged machine to run freely in the natural world, we have endowed it with a behavioral suite that achieves autonomous ascent of thinly forested outdoor hills as well as all indoor stairwells found on the Penn Engineering campus. Further development of its sensorimotor resources and behavioral repertoire may yield a partly autonomous outdoor lab assistant for geoscientists fighting desertification and other environmental impacts. Our new platform, the first gearless legged robot, affords unprecedented proprioceptive sensitivity that we exploit to task it with a growing suite of autonomous mobile manipulation chores entailing rearrangement of moveable objects around it. The common ingredient in all these task specifications and executions is a reliance on formal parallel and sequential compositions of hybrid dynamical attractor basins. Time permitting, I will close with speculative remarks concerning the prospects of achieving by this line of research a formal language for programming autonomous physical work in suitable sensorimotor architectures.
Daniel E. Koditschek is the Alfred Fitler Moore Professor of Electrical and Systems Engineering, within the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science where he serves as Director of the Penn Engineering Research Collaboration Hub (PERCH). Koditschek received his bachelor’s degree in Engineering and Applied Science and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering in 1981 and 1983, all from Yale University. He served on the Yale Faculty in Electrical Engineering until moving to the University of Michigan a decade later. In January 2005, he moved to Penn as Chair of the recently formed Electrical and Systems Engineering Department, a position which he held through 2012. Koditschek’s research interests include robotics and, more generally, the application of dynamical systems theory to intelligent mechanisms. His more than 200 archival journal and refereed conference publications have appeared in a broad spectrum of venues ranging from the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society through The Journal of Experimental Biology, with a concentration in several of the IEEE journals and related transactions. Various aspects of this work have received mention in general scientific publications such as Scientific American and Science as well as in the popular and general lay press such as The New York Times and Discover Magazine.
Here is a sample of some recent mentions in the popular press. Dr. Koditschek is a member of the AMS, ACM, MAA, SIAM, SICB and Sigma Xi and is a Fellow of the IEEE and the AAAS. He was awarded the 2016 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Pioneer Award. Koditschek holds secondary appointments within the School of Engineering and Applied Science in the departments of Computer and Information Science and Mechanical Engineering.