Tales of Robots with Tails

Speaker Bio

Dylan Shell is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University. He is interested in systems that exploit their physical embedding to interact with the world, wishing to understand, design and build such systems. He has published papers on multi-robot task allocation, biologically inspired multiple robot systems, estimation of group-level swarm properties, minimalist and multi-robot manipulation, rigid-body simulation and contact models, human-robot interaction, and robotic theatre.  His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and DARPA. He has been the recipient of an NSF Career award, the Montague Teaching award, the George Bekey Service award, and multiple best reviewer awards.

Description

In this talk, I’ll describe a recent line of our work in which we’ve looked at robots equipped with passive, deformable, linear appendages. These include things like tethers and tails. The discussion will focus on algorithms for planning useful activities by robots equipped in such a way, including for manipulation. We’ll look at operations which exploit the dynamics of such tails (including ‘whip-like’ actions), how to model such appendages, and then how to plan with these models. Finally, we’ll examine some aspects of task-planning for coordination between multiple robots, where they can conduct cooperative towing activities.

This event will be webcast live, and archived, at http://netcast.cs.fiu.edu.