Recent work

• Congratulations: Guru Subramani has successfully defended his Ph.D. Dissertation June 5th, 2019: Please join me in congratulating Guru on the successful defense of his Ph.D. dissertation: “Recognizing and inferring physical actions from human demonstrations for robot programming”.  Congrats to Guru and thank you for all of the hard work!
• CoRL 2018 – Inferring geometric constraints in human demonstrations Abstract—This paper presents an approach for inferring geometric constraints in human demonstrations. In our method, geometric constraint models are built to create representations of kinematic constraints such as fixed point, axial rotation, prismatic motion, planar motion and others across multiple degrees of freedom. Our method infers geometric constraints using both kinematic and force/torque information. The ...
• ICRA/RAL 2018 – Recognizing Geometric Constraints in Human Demonstrations using Force and Position Signals Abstract—This paper introduces a method for recognizing geometric constraints from human demonstrations using both position and force measurements. Our key idea is that position information alone is insufficient to determine that a constraint is active and reaction forces must also be considered to correctly distinguish constraints from movements that just happen to follow a particular ...
• IROS 2017 – Recognizing Actions during Tactile Manipulations through Force Sensing Abstract—In this paper we provide a method for identifying and temporally localizing tactile force actions from measured force signals. Our key idea is to use the continuous wavelet transform (CWT) with the Complex Morlet wavelet to transform force signals into feature vectors amenable to machine learning algorithms. Our method uses these feature vectors to train ...
• 2nd Midwest Robotics Workshop During 5/18/17 to 5/19/17 Prof. Zinn, Chembian Parthiban, Guru Subramani, and Bolun Zhang, together with Prof. Gleicher‘s group, went to the 2nd Midwest Robotics Workshop at Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC). This workshop gathered researchers in the field of robotics from Midwest area, including UW-Madison, TTIC, University of Michigan, UIUC, Purdue University, University of Notre Dame, and Northwestern University. Prof. ...
• ICRA 2015 – Tackling Friction: An analytical modeling approach to understanding friction in single tendon driven continuum manipulators     Abstract: Tendon driven continuum robots have attracted a significant amount of attention in the last decade. As a result several discrete and continuous modeling approaches have been explored in order to understand their behavior. The following article proposes an analytical model describing the influence of frictional effects between the tendon and its conduit in tendon driven ...