Breakfast Club Seminar Series - NEW Two-Speaker Format!

NEW TWO-SPEAKER FORMAT for 2019-2020!

Seth Hutchinson, Ph.D.
Professor and KUKA Chair for Robotics
School of Interactive Computing
Executive Director of the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines 
Georgia Tech

RESEARCH
Robots never know exactly where they are, what they see, or what they're doing. They live in dynamic environments, and must coexist with other, sometimes adversarial agents. Robots are nonlinear systems that can be underactuated, redundant, or constrained, giving rise to complicated problems in automatic control. Many of even the most fundamental computational problems in robotics are provably hard. 

Over the years, these are the issues that have driven my group's research in robotics. Topics of our research include visual servo control, planning with uncertainty, pursuit-evasion games, as well as mainstream problems from path planning and computer vision. The links to the left will take you to pages that describe some of our results to date. 

Gregory S. Sawicki, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and 
School of Biological Sciences
Georgia Tech

"A Bio-inspired Approach to Lower-limb Exoskeleton Design for Augmenting Human Locomotion"

RESEARCH
Gregory Sawicki, Ph.D., directs the Human Physiology of Wearable Robotics (PoWeR) laboratory—where the goal is to combine tools from engineering, physiology and neuroscience to discover neuromechanical principles underpinning optimal locomotion performance and apply them to develop lower-limb robotic devices capable of improving both healthy and impaired human locomotion (e.g., for elite athletes, aging baby-boomers, post-stroke community ambulators).

By focusing on the human side of the human-machine interface, Sawicki and his group have begun to create a roadmap for the design of lower-limb robotic exoskeletons that are truly symbiotic---that is, wearable devices that work seamlessly in concert with the underlying physiological systems to facilitate the emergence of augmented human locomotion performance.

BACKGROUND
Sawicki is an Associate Professor at Georgia Tech with appointments in the School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Biological Sciences. He holds a B.S. from Cornell University (’99) and a M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from University of California-Davis (’01).

Sawicki completed his Ph.D. in Human Neuromechanics at the University of Michigan, Ann-Arbor (‘07) and was an NIH-funded Post-Doctoral Fellow in Integrative Biology at Brown University (‘07-‘09). Sawicki was a faculty member in the Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering at NC State and UNC Chapel Hill from 2009-2017. In summer of 2017, he joined the faculty at Georgia Tech with appointments in Mechanical Engineering 3/4 and Biological Sciences 1/4.