"Limbed Robots: Mobility"

Our December Presentation: Many robots roll, but walking is a real challenge. However, on varying terrain, legs have a potential advantage over wheels. The UCSB Robotics Lab works to develop control algorithms for legged robots. Dr. Byl will give an overview of recent work on rough terrain locomotion. She'll focus on her lab's ongoing work with the RoboSimian, a robot developed by JPL for the recent DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC). UCSB has been collaborating with JPL and other organizations to improve mobility in complex environments.

Our Speaker: Dr. Katie Byl received her BS, MS, and PhD degrees in mechanical engineering from MIT. She is now an associate professor in UCSB's Electrical and Computer Engineering department. Her research focuses on dynamic systems and control, with particular interest in modeling and control techniques to deal with the challenges of the underactuation, stochasticity, and dimensionality reduction that characterize bio-inspired robot locomotion and manipulation in real-world environments. She received an NSF CAREER award (2013), a Hellman Foundation Fellowship (2012), and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in Neuroscience (2011). Dr. Byl has worked on a wide range of research topics in the control of dynamic systems, including magnetic bearing control, flapping-wing microrobotics, piezoelectic noise cancellation for aircraft, vibration isolation for gravity wave detection, and the DARPA Robotics Challenge. She was once a professional gambler on the now-infamous MIT Blackjack Team.

This meeting is sponsored in part by
Santa Barbara News-Press

For information about the Science & Engineering Council.
visit the SEC web page at http://www.scieng.org