Research Interests
My research addresses the algorithmic aspects of advanced factory automation, enabling autonomous robots to function safely and comprehensibly alongside humans in environments structured for people. Doing so will open up many products still assembled by hand today to automation opportunities. Leveraging insights from psychology, sociology, and linguistics, robots will interact with factory workers through natural language and gesture, so that they can be programmed without special training and can operate as peers with human workers. Robots must be aware of their environment and responsive to changes within it. In multi-robot deployments, a distributed planning and control approach is vital to enable scalability and provable correctness. I use IKEA furniture in the laboratory to demonstrate techniques in planning, control, perception and human interaction for automated assembly in the field.