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SUMMARY:Principles of Optimality in Robotics and Neuroscience
DTSTART:20131112T110000
DTSTAMP:20260506T044851Z
UID:0b59ab18ef9763c2548a2f373ed38fc1dab92067a44e4f9489eb590c
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Prof. Timothy Bretl\, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champai
 gn\nBio: Timothy Bretl received his B.S. in Engineering and B.A. in Mathem
 atics from Swarthmore College in 1999\, and his M.S. in 2000 and Ph.D. in 
 2005 both in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford University. Subseq
 uently\, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Computer Scienc
 e\, also at Stanford University. Since 2006\, he has been with the Univers
 ity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign\, where he is an Associate Professor o
 f Aerospace Engineering and a Research Associate Professor in the Coordina
 ted Science Laboratory. He received the National Science Foundation Facult
 y Early Career Development Award in 2010.\nOptimality is a principal that 
 is useful not only for generating robot motion\, but also for modeling the
  behavior of systems with which robots interact. I will discuss two exampl
 es\, one in robotics and the other in neuroscience.\nFirst\, by applicatio
 n of geometric optimal control\, I will show how to establish an appropria
 te configuration space for robotic manipulation of canonical "deformable l
 inear objects" like an elastic rod (e.g.\, surgical suture wire) or a plan
 ar elastic kinematic chain. This result leads to simple algorithms for man
 ipulation planning that are easy to implement and that work well in practi
 ce.\nSecond\, by application of a new framework for inverse optimal contro
 l of differentially flat systems\, I will show how to identify and charact
 erize "invariant outputs" of human locomotion given observations of unimpa
 ired human walkers. This result leads to a method of control design for an
  active prosthetic leg that reduces the time required for parameter tuning
  by a clinician from four hours to four minutes.
LOCATION:CM105 http://plan.epfl.ch/?lang=en&room=CM105
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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