Category: robotics community

A portion of a $2.5M gift from the Daniel E. Offutt III Charitable Trust to endow the Computer Science and Engineering Division Chair will support the Managing Director of the University of Michigan Robotics Institute. 

The late Mr. Offutt graduated from the University of Maryland and received an MBA from Columbia University in 1965. His career was as a stock trader. His longtime friend and colleague, Richard Orenstein, made the gift on behalf of the Trust.

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Deblurred thermal imaging, safe trajectory of manipulator arms, and teaching robots multipart tasks are a few topics that University of Michigan researchers presented at the Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) conference in 2020.

While the conference had to be held remotely this year, organizers still pulled together a wide range of robotics experts to showcase their latest work. Not only is top research featured, but the conference also offered participants the chance to examine the values embedded in their work.

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University of Michigan researchers will present work on topics such as unsupervised learning, motion and path planning, autonomous vehicle navigation, bipedal gaits, wearable robots, and even snakes at next week’s International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2020.

Originally planned for Paris, the conference will be held remotely this year throughout the summer. It is a premier robotics research showcase, and thanks to conference organizers, there are many opportunities to engage with peers beyond reading PDFs on your own computer, such as joining a Slack channel question and answer session, submitting a video to the funny robot challenge, playing robot trivia, or participating in the women in engineering mentoring event.

The work covers the spectrum of Michigan Robotics’ research focus areas, and illustrates the interdisciplinary effort from multiple departments and schools that furthers the potential for robotics to benefit society.

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The University of Michigan Board of Regents approved a number of faculty promotions at their May meeting yesterday, including several Robotics members.

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Chad Jenkins, associate professor of computer science, received an MLK Spirit Award for “exemplifying the leadership and vision of Dr. King through their commitment to social justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

An excerpt from his nomination:

If you want to call Professor Chad Jenkins a leading roboticist, you must also call him a leading roboticist who understands the great equalizing potential of robotics, a roboticist who integrates that belief into his cutting-edge research, outreach, and everyday faculty duties, and a roboticist who is determined to include others into his aspirational efforts.

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