Stanford AA289/ENGR319 - Robotics and Autonomous Systems Seminar - Stanford Seminar - Perceiving, Understanding, and Interacting through Touch

This talk was given by Roberto Calandra of Meta AI on September 30, 2022. Touch is a crucial sensor modality in both humans and robots. Recent advances in tactile sensing hardware have resulted -- for the first time -- in the availability of mass-produced, high-resolution, inexpensive, and reliable tactile sensors. In this talk, I will argue for the importance of creating a new computational field of Touch processing dedicated to the processing and understanding of touch, similarly to what computer vision is for vision. This new field will present significant challenges both in terms of research and engineering. To start addressing some of these challenges, I will introduce our open-source ecosystem dedicated to touch sensing research. Finally, I will present some applications of touch in robotics and discuss other future applications. More about the speaker: Roberto Calandra is a Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley (US) in the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory (BAIR) working with Sergey Levine. His education includes a Ph.D. from TU Darmstadt (Germany) under the supervision of Jan Peters and Marc Deisenroth, a M.Sc. in Machine Learning and Data Mining from the Aalto university (Finland), and a B.Sc. in Computer Science from the Università degli studi di Palermo (Italy). His scientific interests are broadly at the conjunction of Decision-making, Robotics and Machine Learning. Research topics that he is currently developing include Model-based Reinforcement Learning, Tactile Sensing, Morphology Adaptation, and Bayesian Optimization. #robotics