Speaker: Dr. Zheng Yu

Title: From Robotic Grasping to Humanoid Locomotion

Time: 10:00 am-11:30 am on June 30, 2017

Place: Room 506, Building No. 6 of Science Park

Abstract:

In this talk, I will start with several classic problems in grasping research, including force closure test, contact force distribution, grasp quality evaluation, and optimal grasp planning, and reveal how these problems are reduced to geometric problems and better solved by specific iterative algorithms based on their geometric nature. Then, I will show the similarity between multifingered grasping and humanoid locomotion and discuss how the geometric algorithms derived from grasping research can benefit the research of humanoid locomotion. Finally, whole-body locomotion generation and control methods will be introduced.

Introduction of Speaker:

Dr. Zheng received the Ph.D. degree in mechatronics from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, in 2007 and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA, in 2014. He was also a researcher at Disney Research Pittsburgh between 2010 and 2014 and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore between 2007 and 2009. Since 2014 he is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Michigan-Dearborn. His research interests include robotic grasping and manipulation, humanoid locomotion, and geometric algorithms for robots. In these areas, he has 3 US patents and over 40 peer-reviewed publications in international journals and conference proceedings including 8 first-author papers in IEEE Transactions on Robotics and International Journal of Robotics Research. He is an Associate Editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.