Robotics at the University of Pennsylvania from Birth to Maturity: A Review of 30 Years of Research

In this talk, I will reexamine the evolution of robotics research at the University of Pennsylvania, covering the successes and struggles of PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty between 1972 and 2000. In 1972, I came to Penn’s newly formed Department of Computer and Information Science from Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory full of energy, enthusiasm, and the goal of establishing a similar lab at Penn. This talk demonstrates the creativity and ingenuity of young professionals at the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing, and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory. We collaborated with psychologists and engineers to build a community of roboticists. Our curiosity led us to build new vision and tactile systems and to investigate cooperative ground and air robotics systems. We used computational models supported and verified by experiments. Today, I am proud to say that almost all the students who cycled through the GRASP Lab are successful in academia or industry.

Speaker: Ruzena Bajcsy, University of Pennsylvania, Emeritus

Attend in person or click here to watch online.