RIM Seminar - March 2 - Niemeyer on Telepresence
A RIM Seminar will be held on Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011 at Noon. The seminar will take place in the Marcus Nano Building at the corner of Ferst Dr and Atlantic Dr. The talk will focus on continuing challenges within telepresnce robotics.
Model-Mediated Telerobotics: Chasing the Holy Grail of Telepresence
Gunter Niemeyer
Willow Garage
Abstract:
From the very beginning of robotics and telerobotics, we have envisioned using a robot to be our presence at a remote location. This includes seeing what the robot sees and feeling what the robot feels. Over fifty years later this is still true - operators sooner or later want to feel the remote world. Traditional wisdom suggests feeding back sensor information to the user as directly as possible, making the system as transparent as possible. Yet this has always left us in a tight bind between performance and stability. In contrast and to circumvent this dilemma, we will discuss the use of simple models to communicate information indirectly between master and slave. Encoding information as such makes the system more robust, more stable, and perhaps counter-intuitively allows greater presence. The approach also starts bridging the divide between manual remote control and supervisory control, which relies entirely on local autonomy. For perspective we also examine other recent activities at Willow Garage.
Bio:
Dr. Günter Niemeyer is a senior research scientist at Willow Garage Inc. and a consulting professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. His research examines physical human-robotic interactions and interaction dynamics, force sensitivity and feedback, teleoperation with and without communication delays, and haptic interfaces. This involves efforts ranging from realtime motor and robot control to user interface design. Dr. Niemeyer received his M.S. and Ph.D. from MIT in the areas of adaptive robot control and bilateral teleoperation, introducing the concept of wave variables. He also held a postdoctoral research position at MIT developing surgical robotics. In 1997 he joined Intuitive Surgical Inc., where he helped create the daVinci Minimally Invasive Surgical System. This telerobotic system enables surgeons to perform complex procedures through small (5 to 10mm) incisions using an immersive interface and is in use at hundreds of hospitals worldwide. He joined the Stanford faculty in the Fall of 2001, directing the Telerobotics Lab and teaching dynamics, controls, and telerobotics. He has been a member of the Willow Garage research group since 2009.