BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Penn Engineering Events - ECPv6.16.3//NONSGML v1.0//EN
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
METHOD:PUBLISH
X-WR-CALNAME:Penn Engineering Events
X-ORIGINAL-URL:https://seasevents.nmsdev7.com
X-WR-CALDESC:Events for Penn Engineering Events
REFRESH-INTERVAL;VALUE=DURATION:PT1H
X-Robots-Tag:noindex
X-PUBLISHED-TTL:PT1H
BEGIN:VTIMEZONE
TZID:America/New_York
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
TZOFFSETFROM:-0500
TZOFFSETTO:-0400
TZNAME:EDT
DTSTART:20250309T070000
END:DAYLIGHT
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZOFFSETFROM:-0400
TZOFFSETTO:-0500
TZNAME:EST
DTSTART:20251102T060000
END:STANDARD
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
TZOFFSETFROM:-0500
TZOFFSETTO:-0400
TZNAME:EDT
DTSTART:20260308T070000
END:DAYLIGHT
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZOFFSETFROM:-0400
TZOFFSETTO:-0500
TZNAME:EST
DTSTART:20261101T060000
END:STANDARD
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
TZOFFSETFROM:-0500
TZOFFSETTO:-0400
TZNAME:EDT
DTSTART:20270314T070000
END:DAYLIGHT
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZOFFSETFROM:-0400
TZOFFSETTO:-0500
TZNAME:EST
DTSTART:20271107T060000
END:STANDARD
END:VTIMEZONE
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20260213T103000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20260213T114500
DTSTAMP:20260601T161547
CREATED:20260105T195617Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260105T195617Z
UID:15353-1770978600-1770983100@seasevents.nmsdev7.com
SUMMARY:Spring 2026 GRASP on Robotics: George Konidaris\, Brown University\, "Unifying the Stack: A Principled Structuralist Approach to Intelligent Robot Control"
DESCRIPTION:This event will be in-person ONLY in Wu and Chen Auditorium. \nABSTRACT\nThere are two dominant approaches to designing intelligent robots. One\, typified by language behavior models\, leverages unstructured deep neural networks and learning from demonstration to generate behavior. These approaches have had several impressive successes but face scaling\, trust\, and explainability challenges. The second approach seeks to integrate\, rather than discard\, technologies from existing subfields (like motion planning and SLAM) into a coherent control architecture that retains their favorable properties while accessing the strengths of deep network. The primary challenge here is that there is no unifying theoretical framework for all of robotics: each subfield was designed and studied largely in isolation. \nI will propose a unifying framework that models the control stack as layers of increasingly abstract decision processes. Each layer combines perceptual and action abstractions\, to generate a more tractable decision process by exploiting structure in the world or the robot. Existing technologies fit naturally into this stack as observation or action abstractions. The result is a natural hierarchy with a few missing technologies. I will discuss my group’s recent results on both filling in these missing technologies\, and more generally in learning decision process abstractions from pixel-level data.
URL:https://seasevents.nmsdev7.com/event/spring-2026-grasp-on-robotics-george-konidaris-brown-university-unifying-the-stack-a-principled-structuralist-approach-to-intelligent-robot-control/
LOCATION:Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101)\, Levine Hall\, 3330 Walnut Street\, Philadelphia\, PA\, 19104\, United States
CATEGORIES:Seminar
ORGANIZER;CN="General Robotics%2C Automation%2C Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Lab":MAILTO:grasplab@seas.upenn.edu
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR