Vijay Kumar


Vijay Kumar: Robots that fly ... and cooperate

Published on Mar 1, 2012

In his lab at Penn, Vijay Kumar and his team build flying quadrotors, small, agile robots that swarm, sense each other, and form ad hoc teams -- for construction, surveying disasters and far more.
 

Aerial robot drones | Dr. Vijay Kumar | TEDxGateway

Published on Mar 9, 2015

Kumar’s group works on creating autonomous ground and aerial robots, designing bio-inspired algorithms for collective behaviors, and on robot swarms. They have won many best paper awards at conferences, and group alumni are leaders in teaching, research, business and entrepreneurship. Kumar is a fellow of ASME and IEEE and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Vijay Kumar is the UPS Foundation Professor with appointments in the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, Computer and Information Science, and Electrical and Systems Engineering.
Vijay Kumar has held many administrative positions in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, including director of the GRASP Laboratory, chair of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, and the position of the Deputy Dean. He served as the assistant director of robotics and cyber physical systems at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
 

Devices, systems, and methods for automated monitoring enabling precision agriculture

Published on Jun 16, 2015

Video description of work to be presented at IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (IEEE CASE 2015) in Gothenburg, Sweden, August 24 to 28, 2015.

"Devices, Systems, and Methods for Automated Monitoring enabling Precision Agriculture"

Abstract:
Addressing the challenges of feeding the burgeon- ing world population with limited resources requires innovation in sustainable, efficient farming. The practice of precision agriculture offers many benefits towards addressing these challenges, such as improved yield and efficient use of such resources as water, fertilizer and pesticides. We describe the design and development of a light-weight, multi-spectral 3D imaging device that can be used for automated monitoring in precision agriculture. The sensor suite consists of a laser range scanner, multi-spectral cameras, a thermal imaging camera, and navigational sensors. We present techniques to extract four key data products—plant morphology, canopy volume, leaf area index, and fruit counts—using the sensor suite. We demonstrate its use with two systems: multi-rotor micro aerial vehicles and on a human-carried, shoulder-mounted harness. We show results of field experiments conducted in collaboration with growers and agronomists in vineyards, apple orchards and orange groves.
 

The future of flying robots

Published on Nov 4, 2015

At his lab at the University of Pennsylvania, Vijay Kumar and his team have created autonomous aerial robots inspired by honeybees. Their latest breakthrough: Precision Farming, in which swarms of robots map, reconstruct and analyze every plant and piece of fruit in an orchard, providing vital information to farmers that can help improve yields and make water management smarter.
 

The Picobug : a mesoscale robot that can run, fly, and grasp

Published on Mar 9, 2016

In this paper we present the flying monkey, a novel robot platform having three main capabilities: walking, grasping, and flight. This new robotic platform merges one of the world’s smallest quadrotor aircraft with a lightweight, single-degree-of-freedom walking mechanism and an SMA-actuated gripper to enable all three functions in a 30g package. The main goal and key contribution of this paper is to design and prototype the flying monkey that has increased mission life and capabilities through the combination of the functionalities of legged and aerial robots.

Paper submitted to ICRA2016.

The Flying Monkey: a multifunctional mesoscale robot that can run, fly, and grasp, Y. Mulgaonkar, J.-S. Koh, B. Araki, L. Guerrero, D. Aukes, A. Makineni, M.T. Tolley, D. Rus, R.J. Wood, V. Kumar, to appear: IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, Stockholm, Sweden, May, 2016.
 

Towards fully autonomous visual inspection of dark featureless dam penstocks using MAVs

Published on Mar 9, 2016

This video shows experiments and results of our work submitted to IROS 2016 on inspection of critical infrastructure lacking geometric features and illumination such as penstocks.
 

Vijay Kumar: flying robots | Artificial Intelligence (AI) Podcast

Published on Sep 8, 2019

Vijay Kumar is one of the top roboticists in the world, professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Dean of Penn Engineering, former director of GRASP lab, or the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception Laboratory at Penn that was established back in 1979, 40 years ago. Vijay is perhaps best known for his work in multi-robot systems (or robot swarms) and micro aerial vehicles, robots that elegantly cooperate in flight under all the uncertainty and challenges that real-world conditions present. This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast.

Outline:

0:00 - Introduction
0:58 - First robot
3:37 - Proudest accomplishments
5:32 - Drone, UAV, aerial robot terminology
6:23 - Biologically inspired robotics
8:34 - Swarm as an individual organism
11:18 - Distributed control
15:04 - Types of flying robots
19:57 - Math in a TED talk
20:29 - What does it take to make a robot fly?
27:09 - Getting from point A to point B
29:22 - Machine learning in robotics
33:53 - Autonomous vehicles
37:05 - Autonomous driving vs autonomous flight
38:52 - Applications of robot swarms
40:12 - Batteries
42:30 - Flying cars
44:03 - Robots and humans
49:48 - Sci-fi inspired fears of robots
52:22 - Open problems in robotics
 
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