Research Area: Robotics

Robotics is increasingly affecting our daily lives and impacting healthcare, transportation, defense, manufacturing, and entertainment. New robots and algorithms are enabling physicians to perform more precise surgical procedures, assisting individuals with tasks of daily living, enabling autonomous agents to maneuver through cluttered environments, and manipulating materials at large and small scales.

Subareas: Assistive Robotics, Manipulation, Medical Robotics, Motion Planning & Control, Robot Learning, Robot Perception

At UNC, we are creating new algorithms to address fundamental computational challenges in robotics, including increasing the autonomy of robots, motion planning in complex environments, and providing new interfaces for natural human-robot interaction. We bring a broad range of expertise to these problems, including geometric methods, probabilistic methods, physically-based simulation, many-core CPU and GPU parallelization, cloud computing, machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision. We apply the new algorithms and methods we develop to a variety of applications involving both physical robots as well as virtual agents. Current applications include robot-assisted medical procedures, surgery training, robot design optimization, autonomous vehicles, and personal assistant robots.

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