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One Robot for Every Task - Daniela Rus, MIT
Plenary - May 27th, 2015
Abstract: The digitization of practically everything coupled with advanced robotics promises a future with democratized use of machines and wide-spread customization. However, pervasive use of robots remains a hard problem. What are the gaps that can take us to a future where robots are common, they figure things out, they operate aware of each other, and they contribute to making the world a better place?
In this talk I will discuss challenges toward pervasive use of robots and recent developments in customizing robots. What if we could automatically design, fabricate, and program robots from an intuitive description of the task so that anyone could use a robot? What if robots could be better at figuring things out? What if robots could be more adept at interacting with each other and with people? I will describe recent results in automating and customizing the fabrication of robots and enhancing their reasoning and communication capabilities. By enabling on-demand creation of programmable robots, we can begin to imagine a world with one robot for every task.
Biography: Daniela Rus is the Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. Rus's research interests are in robotics, mobile computing, and big data. The key focus of her research is to develop the science of networked/distributed/collaborative robotics, by asking: how can many machines collaborate to achieve a common goal? Rus is a Class of 2002 MacArthur Fellow, a fellow of ACM, AAAI and IEEE, and a member of the NAE. She earned her PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University. Prior to joining MIT, Rus was a professor in the Computer Science Department at Dartmouth College.
