Where, what, how: Geometry, semantics and affordances for robotic mobile manipulation

The tremendous potential offered by robotic automation has been evidenced by its revolution of large-scale manufacturing, mining, and agriculture. Now, with increasing social and economic pressures to transfer this success to service-focused sectors, we’re seeing robots moving into our shops, our hospitals, and our homes. The types of sorting, fetching, and tidying tasks that we’re increasingly demanding of our robots rely on robust, object-instance-level perception, along with agent-aware planning algorithms for safe and effective physical interactions. This talk will discuss the tight connections between perception, planning and learning for robot grasping and nonprehensile interaction with articulated objects. We will also take an outlook on how these skills can be combined to achieve robots that can adapt to solve long horizon tasks.

Speaker’s profile

Jen Jen Chung is an Associate Professor in Mechatronics within the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at The University of Queensland, and she is also a Visiting Scientist at CSIRO. Her current research interests include perception, planning and learning for robotic mobile manipulation, algorithms for robot navigation through human crowds, informative path planning and adaptive sampling. Prior to working at UQ, Jen Jen was a Senior Researcher in the Autonomous Systems Lab (ASL) at ETH Zürich from 2018-2022 and was a Postdoctoral Scholar at Oregon State University researching multiagent learning methods from 2014-2017. She completed her PhD on information-based exploration-exploitation strategies for autonomous soaring platforms at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics in the University of Sydney. She received her PhD (2014) and BE (2010) from the University of Sydney.