This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Wu and Chen and virtual attendance on Zoom.

ABSTRACT

Task and motion planning has application in robotics, animation, virtual prototyping and training, and even for seemingly unrelated tasks such as evaluating architectural plans or simulating protein motions. Surprisingly, sampling-based methods have proven effective on problems from all these domains. In this talk, we provide an overview of sampling-based planning and describe some methods developed in our group, including strategies suited for collaborative task planning, multi-agent systems, and analyzing bio-molecules.

We will finish with a short introduction of our new Mind in Vitro NSF Expeditions project in which we will use neurons grown from mouse stem cells to build simple devices that can be composed to form more complex systems. We plan to train these systems to obtain behaviors which can be used to build programmable bio-robots.