GRASP Newsletter – Summer 2009
Volume 4
The GRASP Newsletter is an annual electronic newsletter for GRASP members, alumni, friends, and family. For more up-to-date information, we invite you to regularly visit the GRASP website at http://www.grasp.upenn.edu
As of June 26, 2009, the GRASP Laboratory hosts 48 PhD students, 9 postdoctoral researchers, 5 visiting researchers, 27 graduate students enrolled in the
Master's of Robotics program, and 44 undergraduate and high-school summer interns, supervised by 15 faculty cross Penn Engineering.
In September 2009, we will welcome the incoming graduate student class of 21 Master's of Robotics and 12 PhD students.
A special acknowledgment to our lab coordinator, Charity Payne, who collected all facts below.
AWARDS AND HONORS
Dan Lee was appointed Evan C Thompson Endowed Term Professor for Excellence in Teaching.
George Pappas was announced as an IEEE Fellow for his contributions to design and analysis of hybrid control systems.
Ruzena Bajscy, our GRASP Lab founder and CIS faculty member, received the prestigious 2009 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science from the Franklin Institute.
Ben Taskar was selected to participate on the DARPA 2009 Computer Science Study Panel.
Katherine J. Kuchenbecker and William McMahan won the award for "Best Hands-On Demonstration" of new haptic technology at the 2009 IEEE World Haptics Conference in Salt Lake City.
Mark Yim received the Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching in the MEAM Department. He is the third GRASP faculty after Jean Gallier and Max Mintz, winning the most distinguished teaching award.
Two Graspees, the only students from Engineering, CIS PhD student Roy Anati and ESE PhD student Goran Lynch were awarded the “Penn Prize for Excellence in Teaching by Graduate Students” for their involvement, passion, initiative taking, and leadership.
Rob Ghrist has been awarded the S. Reid Warren, Jr. Award! This award is presented annually by the undergraduate student body and the Engineering Alumni Society in recognition of outstanding service in stimulating and guiding the intellectual and professional development of undergraduate students in SEAS.
Katherine Kuchenbecker received a prestigious NSF CAREER award on her work, "Haptography: Capturing and Recreating the Rich Feel of Real Surfaces."
Kostas Daniilidis was promoted to Professor.
NEW FACULTY GRANTS
NSF CAREER "Haptography: Capturing and Recreating the Rich Feel of Real Surfaces" a five-year grant awarded to Katherine Kuchenbecker.
NSF CDI-II "Cyber Enhancement of Spatial Cognition for the Visually Impaired", a four-year grant awarded Kostas Daniilidis.
NSF HCC-Small "Modular Tactile Feedback for Whole-Body Motion Guidance" a three-year grant was awarded to Katherine J. Kuchenbecker.
NSF RI-MEDIUM "Collaborative Research: Dynamically-Structured Conditional Random Fields for Complex, Natural Domains" a three-year grant awarded to Fernando Pereira, Ben Taskar, and Andres McCallum.
NSF RI-MEDIUM "From Actors to Actions: Analysis and Alignment of Images, Video and Text" a three-year grant awarded to Jianbo Shi, Ben Taskar, and Fernando Pereira.
ARL Robotics CTA, one-year grant awarded to Daniel Koditschek, Jianbo Shi, and Kostas Daniilidis through GDRS.
ONR MURI "ANTIDOTE: Adaptive Networks for Threat and Intrusion Detection or Termination" a five-year grant awarded to Vijay Kumar and Maxim Likhachev through USC.
ONR MURI "Decentralized Reasoning in Reduced Information Spaces" a five-year grant awarded to Jianbo Shi and Maxim Likhachev through CMU.
ONR MURI "Smart Adaptive Reliable Teams for Persistent Surveillance (SMARTS)" a five-year grant awarded to Vijay Kumar through MIT.
ONR Phase I STTR: "Realtime Determination and Prediction of Aircraft Trajectories Using Limited Sensor Data" awarded to Maxim Likhachev through Dragonfly Pictures Inc.
Robotics Technology Consortium "Modular Software Architecture for Rapid Multi-robot Coordination, Mapping and Structure Characterization" an one-year grant awarded to CJ Taylor and Vijay Kumar through Sarnoff Corporation.
Robotics Technology Consortium "Mappingin Complex Terrains" one-year grant awarded to Maxim Likhachev and Kostas Daniilidis through Sarnoff Corporation.
DARPA Study Group "Precise Structured Learning From Imprecise Supervison" awarded to Ben Taskar.
DARPA-Phase 1-STTR "Recognitions of Buildings from Activities (BLUE)" one-year awarded to Jianbo Shi and Kostas Daniilidis through Kitware Inc.
DARPA-Phase I-SBIR "Detecting and Tracking Multiple Moving Objects from a Moving Platform" awarded to Maxim Likhachev and Jianbo Shi through Dragonfly Pictures Inc.
Willow Garage gift "Development of Standardized Library of Planning Algorithms and New Planning Algorithms for Manipulation Tasks", awarded to Maxim Likhachev.
Dragonfly Pictures Inc. contract "Autonomous Landing Site Selection and Confirmation for Unmanned Helicopters", awarded to Maxim Likhachev.
Dragonfly Pictures Inc. contract "Path Planning for Unmanned Helicopters Navigating Urban Environments"
awarded to Maxim Likhachev.
DARPA Phase I SBIR "Path Planning in Dynamic Environments", awarded to Maxim Likhachev through Dragonfly Pictures Inc.
Army Phase I SBIR "Unmanned Ground & Air System for CBRNE Contaminated Personnel Recovery", awarded to Maxim Likhachev and Vijay Kumar through Dragonfly Pictures Inc.
GRADUATE EDUCATION
Graduating PhD Students:
David Cappelleri (MEAM '08)
Timothee Cour (CIS '09)
Ankita Kumar (CIS '08)
Nathan Michael (MEAM '08)
Graduating Master's of Robotics Students:
Allison Mathis '08
Erik Smith '08
Snehit Neenakri '09
Jennifer King '09
Angelos Stamatakis '09
Kyle Winfree '09
UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH
The GRASP Lab Faculty have involved 44 undergraduate and high school students in research during summer 2009 !!
Adrienne Arndt (MEAM – Kuchenbecker)
Tal Bar-Or (MEAM – Kuchenbecker)
Willy Bernal (ESE – Lee)
Jordan Brindza (ESE – Lee)
Levi Cai (CIS – Daniilidis)
Kiuk Chung (CIS – Daniilidis)
Russell Cohen (CIS – Daniilidis)
Jason DeLisser (ESE – Lee)
Arielle Evans (MEAM – Kuchenbecker)
Thomai Gastopoulos (MEAM – Kumar)
Matthew Hale (ESE – Koditschek)
Mark E Henderson (CIS – Likhachev)
Rikki Irwin (MEAM – Kumar)
Mallory Jensen (MEAM – Kuchenbecker)
Christine Kappeyne (MEAM – Kuchenbecker)
Ryan Knopf (ESE – Koditschek)
Sarah Koehler (MEAM –Yim)
Adam Komoroski (MEAM – Kumar)
Nils Landin (MEAM – Kuchenbecker)
Alexandra Lee (ESE –Lee)
Pedro L Maia (CIS – Taylor)
Noe Martinez (CIS – Daniilidis)
Andrew Matas (CIS – Taskar)
Zach Meister (CIS – Daniilidis)
Oscar F Nunez (CIS – Taylor)
Matteus Jiawei Pan (CIS – Taskar)
Rebecca Pierce (JHU – Kuchenbecker)
Amal Rahuman (MEAM – Kuchenbecker)
Sam Russem (ESE – Koditschek)
John Schaeffer (CIS – Daniilidis)
Seth Shannin (ESE – Koditschek)
Barry Scharfman (ESE – Lee)
Michael Shomin (MEAM – Kumar)
Roman Shor (ESE –Lee)
Dorsey Standish (MEAM – Kuchenbecker)
Neil Tenenholtz (MEAM – Kuchenbecker)
Travis VanSchoyk (MEAM – Kumar)
Patrick Yeo-Ho Yoon (ESE – Lee)
Nathan Zeichner (MEAM – Kumar)
High School Researchers
Mason Glidden (CIS – Daniilidis)
Jared Katz (MEAM – Kuchenbecker)
Trisha Kumar (MEAM – Kumar)
Jonah Portman (MEAM – Kuchenbecker)
EVENTS
Sep 23rd 2008, Mark Yim presented "Practice Integrated Cirriculum" at Ignite Philly 2.
Sep 27th 2008, CJ Taylor and
Mark Yim participated at NextFest 2008 and presented the ckBot.
Dec 8th, 2008, MEAM 410/510 Design of Mechatronic Systems 2008 Project Competition. ROBOCKEY - The first annual ROBOCKEY Cup Tournament with 8 student teams.
Feb 27th, 2009, The Interdepartmental GRASP Open House for PhD candidates included GRASP presentations, demos and a dessert reception.
April 16, 2009, Penn's T.C. Chan Center for Building Simulation and Energy Studies hosted Darren Robinson, the co-director of the Masters of Advanced Studies in Architecture and Sustainable Development at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and he was given the opportunity to visit the GRASP Lab.
April 22nd, 2009, RoboFest: A Celebration of Robotics at the GRASP Lab was a Symposium and Open House honoring Ruzena Bajcsy – GRASP Lab founder and Recipient of the 2009 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science.
April 30th, 2009, Katherine Kuchenbecker's MEAM 625 class on haptic interfaces presented their course projects at the Haptics Open House, which was attended by over 200 people.
May 2nd - 3rd, 2009, Dan Lee and the UPennalizers, Penn's Robocup team, competed at the 2009 RoboCup US Open and earned a close second place finish. The UPennalizers competed in the Robocup Standard Platform league, using the Nao humanoid robots, and were one of 4 US teams in the competition.
May 21st, 2009, Vijay Kumar, Jim Keller and Charity Payne represented the GRASP Lab at the Congressional Robotics Caucus held at the Capitol Visitors Center in Washington, DC.
June 7th, 2009, The annual GRASP Lab Summer Barbecue was held at the Belmont Grove Pavilion in Fairmount Park.
WORKSHOPS/CONFERENCES
July 14th-17th, 2008, Vijay Kumar, George Pappas and Oussama Khatib were the program chairs for the 11th International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER) 2008 in Athens, Greece.
Nov 10th and 11th, 2008, GRASP hosted the NSF/IUCRC Industry Day Meeting for the Center for Safety, Security and Rescue Research with participation from Drexel University, the University of Denver and the University of Minnesota along with industries such as ARL, Boeing, Dragonfly Pictures, Johnson Controls, NSF, Sandbox Innovations, USMA and Willow Garage.
June 3rd-4th, 2009, The 3rd Workshop on Swarming in Natural and Engineering Systems was organized by Vijay Kumar along with Daniela Rus and A. Stephen Morse, which was held in Block Island, Rhode Island.
May 3rd-8th, 2010, Vijay Kumar is the program chair for the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA2010) in Anchorage, Alaska.
ROBOFEST 2009 SPEAKERS
A Symposium honoring Ruzena Bajcsy on April 22nd featured talks by:
Peter Allen ( Columbia University)
Ruzena Bajcsy (University of California, Berkeley)
Henrik Christensen (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Henry Fuchs (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
Anthony Hoogs (Kitware, Inc)
Oussama Khatib (Stanford University)
Pradeep Khosla (Carnegie Mellon University)
Allison Okamura (Johns Hopkins University)
SEMINARS
The Fall and Spring GRASP Seminar Series featured a stellar lineup of speakers:
Sept 5th Eric Klavins (University of Washington)
Sept 12th Maxim Likhachev (University of Pennsylvania)
Sept 26th Alexander Rakhlin (UC Berkeley and University of Pennsylvania)
Oct 3rd Pieter Abbeel (UC Berkeley)
Oct 10th Longin Jan Latecki (Temple University)
Oct 17th Laurent Younes (Johns Hopkins University)
Oct 24th Yoshiaki Sakagami (Honda Research Institute USA Inc.)
Oct 31st Peter Allen (Columbia University)
Hugh Durrant-Whyte (University of Sydney, Australia)
Nov 7th Klara Nahrstedt (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Nov 14th Oliver Brock (University of Massachusetts)
Nov 21st Jeff Trinkle (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)
Dec 5th Chris Gerdes (Stanford University)
Jan 16th Srinivasa Narasimhan (Carnegie Mellon University)
Jan 23rd Emmanuelle Collins (Florida A&M University and Florida State University)
Jan 30th Victor Preciado (University of Pennsylvania)
Feb 6th Todd Zickler (Harvard University)
Feb 13th Chris Rogers (Tufts University)
Feb 20th Jerome Le Ny (University of Pennsylvania)
Feb 27th Bernard Chazelle (Princeton University)
Mar 6th Nicholas Roy (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Mar 20th Dmitri Tymoczko (Princeton University)
Mar 27st Devavrat Shah (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
April 3rd Karon MacLean (University of British Columbia)
April 10th Paul Newman (University of Oxford)
April 17th Howie Choset (Carnegie Mellon University)
April 24th John Lygeros (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich)
May 1st Hana El-Samad (University of California, San Francisco)
May 8th Jennifer King and Snehit Neenakri (Robo Master's Presentations)
The 2008-2009 GRASP Special Seminars included:
Sept 18th Amit Roy-Chowdhury (University of California, Riverside)
Oct 14th Ioannis Poulakakis (Univerisity of Michigan)
Oct 20th Ashutosh Saxena (Stanford University)
Nov 19th Andrew Ng (Stanford University)
Dec 8th Jason Derenick ( Lehigh University)
Jan 14th Lena Gorelick (Weizmann Institute of Science)
Feb 2nd Edgar Lobaton (University of California, Berkeley)
Mar 5th Dimitris P. Tsakiris (Institute of Computer Science - FORTH)
Mar 16th Steve Cousins (Willow Garage, CEO)
Mar 25th Danny Kaufman (University of British Columbia/Rutgers University)
April 21st Siwei Lyu (University of Albany, SUNY)
Fei-Fei Li (Princeton University)
May 20th Evan Ribnick (University of Minnesota)
May 22nd Shreyas Sundaram (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
June 8th Juan Mejia (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
INDUSTRY OUTREACH
Oct 17th Jim Ostrowski (Evolution Robotics Retail, Inc.) EMTM Lecture
Oct 24th Yoshiaki Sakagami (Honda Research Institute USA Inc.) GRASP Industry Talk/ Seminar
Nov 10th Sachin Chitta (Willow Garage, Inc) IUCRC Meeting
Dec 15th Tom Panzarella (Freedom Sciences) GRASP Industry Talk
Jan 15th Anthony Hoogs (Kitware, Inc.) BLUE STTR Kick-off Meeting 2009
Feb 16th Rahul Swaminathan (Deutsche Telekom AG Labs in Berlin) GRASP Industry Talk
Feb 24th David Hanson (Hanson Robotics Inc., Founder/CTO) MEAM Seminar
Feb 27th Arch Owen (Foster-Miller) GRASP Industry Talk
Mar 16th Steve Cousins (Willow Garage, CEO) GRASP Industry Talk/Special Seminar
EDUCATION OUTREACH
July 25th, 2008, Katherine Kuchenbecker gave a lecture, "Haptics: Touch-Based Interaction with Real, Remote, and Virtual Environments," for participants in the Summer Academy in Applied Science and Technology (SAAST) at the University of Pennsylvania.
Aug, 22nd, 2008, Katherine Kuchenbecker presented a hands-on design activity "Mechanical Engineering in Action!" for PennGEMS: Girls in Engineering Math and Science Camp at the University of Pennsylvania.
Oct 29th, 2008, Physics 2 students from the Westtown Friends School Science Department visited the GRASP Lab for a tour.
Oct 29th, 2008, The GRASP Lab gave two large tours for students and their parents from numerous area high schools participating in Nanoday at Penn.
Nov 15th, 2008, SEAS Office of Academic Programs and GRASP organized a very exciting whole day Robotics event for 96 7th-grade
members of the Center for Talented Youth and their parents.
Nov 15th, 2008, Katherine Kuchenbecker presented a lecture "Haptics: Touch-Based Interaction with Real, Remote, and Virtual Environments," for participant parents, Science and Technology Series, Center for Talented Youth Robotics Program at Penn.
Nov 19th, 2008, Overbrook High School's Robotics Team visited the GRASP Lab for a tour and mentoring.
Dec 19th, 2008, Sun Valley High School's AP Physics class visited the GRASP Lab for a tour.
Jan 7th, 2009, Springfield Township High School's robotics class for gifted 9th graders under Tammy Pirmann visited the GRASP Lab for a tour and to speak with some of our faculty.
Feb 17th, 2009, Two GRASP Lab tours were persented to students that particiapted in E-Week through SEAS and the Engineering Student Activities Council, ESAC.
Mar 27th, 2009, GRASP Lab tours were given to middle school girls from the Lower Marion School District brought in through AWE and Michele Grab.
April 4th, 2009, The National Society of Black Engineers, NSBE, at Penn held their second annual STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) Summit to educate Philadelphia middle and high school students and were given a chance to tour the GRASP Lab.
April, 22nd, 2009, The Neumann Goretti High School tech club in South Philadelphia under Natalie Carter were given a tour of the GRASP Lab and visited the SIG Center.
April 23rd, 2009, The "2009 Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day" brought two groups of Penn employees with their children to tour the GRASP Lab.
April 23rd, 2009, Three large tour groups totaling 84 female students from about 25 high schools in the Delaware Valley participating in the WICS High School Day for Girls were given the opportunity for a tour of the GRASP Lab and to speak with some of our female graduate students.
May 2nd, 2009, Katherine Kuchenbecker presented the keynote speech "Please Touch! Haptic Technology for Games, Surgery, and More," at the
RobotGames Competition at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada.
May 13th, 2009, Penn Engineers without Borders brought a group of students from their after school program at Saul High School to tour the GRASP Lab.
May 27th and June 2nd, 2009, Jianbo Shi presented his talk "Vison for the Blind" for promoting interest in Computer Science and Robotics to George Washington Carver High School of Engineering and Science students under Scott Koehler.
June 2nd, 2009, Jianbo Shi presented his talk "Vison for the Blind" for promoting interest in Computer Science and Robotics to Central High School students under Steve Kolman.
June 2nd, 2009, Jianbo Shi presented his talk "Vison for the Blind" for promoting interest in Computer Science and Robotics to Philadelphia High School for Girls students under Harvey Rubin.
June 3rd, 2009, Springfield Township High School's gifted class under Tammy Pirmann visited the GRASP Lab for a tour and to speak with some of our faculty.
June 12th, 2009, The SUNFEST students through ESE were presented with a talk from Oleg Naroditsky, one of our PhD students, and were given a tour of the GRASP Lab afterwards.
IN THE MEDIA
October 7th, 2008, The Daily Pennsylvanian featured CJ Taylor and Mark Yim's ckBot in "It walks, crawls and re-assembles itself."
December 8th, 2008, Mark Yim in the Top 100 Stories of Discover Magazine, "#81: Smart-Matter Robots Reassemble Themselves."
February 9th, 2009, Walking over loose sand is hard work, even for robots. But Dan Koditschek's team has shown that an insect-like robot can make quicker progress in sand by using a different gait from that used on hard ground. News Releases: Discovery News, Nature, Proceedings from the NAS, Science, and NewScientist.
March 1st, 2009, Katherine Kuchenbecker featured on the Penn Gazette with the iTorqU, an ungrounded torque feedback device. "History Starts Here."
April 1st, 2009, Dan Lee is featured in Knowledge@Wharton and Forbes.com for his research, "Making Robots More Like Us."
April 1st, 2009, Dan Koditschek, Hal Komsuoglu and Daniel Goldman published their paper "March of the SandBots" on IEEE Spectrum Online.
April 28th, 2009, Dan Koditschek and Hal Komsuoglu's research work along with Daniel Goldman from Georgia Tech was featured in the Daily Pennsylvanian, "Researchers draw inspiration for their robot from animals."
May 12th, 2009, Multiple press mentions of Dan Koditschek's RiSE robot work in MIT's Technology Review and Calin Belta, another GRASP alumnus, talks in the article, "Cutting-Edge Robots Show Off in Japan, ICRA 2009 will showcase everything from tree-climbing machines to robots that politely ask for directions."
ALUMNI NEWS
Hadas Kress-Gazit started as Assistant Professor at the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University.
Philippos Mordohai started as Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science at Stevens Institute of Technology.
David Capelleri started as Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science at Stevens Institute of Technology.
Christopher Geyer assumed the position of Principal Scientist at irobot.
Volkan Isler moved from RPI to the Department of Computer Science at the University of Minnesota.
Hany Farid's article "Digital Image Forensics" appears in the June 2008 issue of Scientific American.
Georgios Fainekos won the 2008 Frank Anger Memorial ACM SIGBED/SIGSOFT Student Award.
January 12th, 2009, Andy Hicks' catadioptric work in the Philadelphia Inquirer and SCIAM: 60 second science.
Paulo Tabuada won the 2009 Donald Eckman Award from the American Automatic Control Council.
Alumni: To contribute updates, please e-mail Charity Payne at charity@seas.upenn.edu