11/27/2024
By Paul Robinette
Who: Prof. Neil Dantam, Colorado School of Mines
When: Dec 2, 2024 at Noon
Where: Southwick Hall, Room 240
More details:
Title: Robot Planning and Manipulation: Symbols, Geometry, and Feasibility
Abstract: Autonomous robots need to decide on actions and follow motions to achieve those actions, yet issues of symbolic planning and motion planning have long been addressed separately. This talk describes our work on integrated task and motion planning leading to a key challenge, and our novel results, on deciding the existence of motion plans. This line of work offers new capabilities for robots to
plan for difficult and complex manipulation scenarios.
Bio: Neil T. Dantam is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Colorado School of Mines and Faculty Fellow at DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory. His work focuses on robot planning and manipulation, covering task and motion planning, kinematics, robot communication, and real-time software. This research program is supported by the NSF, NASA, DoD.
Previously, Neil was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Computer Science at Rice University working with Prof. Lydia Kavraki and Prof. Swarat Chaudhuri. Neil received a Ph.D. in Robotics from Georgia Tech, advised by Prof. Mike Stilman, and B.S. degrees in Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University