Siebel School Speaker Series Master Calendar

Abstract: What does it take to build mobile manipulation systems that can competently operate on previously unseen objects in previously unseen environments? In this talk, I will present recent case studies on building two such systems: one for interacting with articulated objects using a wheeled manipulator, and another for whole-body object grasping using a humanoid robot. I will discuss findings from large-scale real-world evaluations and distill key principles for building generalizable mobile manipulation systems, including a central one: that the best results come from marrying classical robotics principles with large-scale learning, rather than treating them as competing paradigms, at least for now.

Bio: Saurabh Gupta is an Associate Professor in the ECE Department at UIUC. Before starting at UIUC in 2019, he received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2018 and spent the following year as a Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research in Pittsburgh. His research interests span computer vision, robotics, and machine learning, with a focus on building agents that can intelligently interact with the physical world around them.

Location: We will meet in CSL Studio 1232 — please enter through the center doors in the middle of the parking garage's south face if you do not have card swipe access to CSL Studio.

Looking forward to seeing you! In addition, for full information and recordings of the seminar talks, please check our seminar website below!

Robotics Seminar Team