Seminar Series | The Robot Learning Lab at Imperial College London

Robot Learning Seminar Series

The Robot Learning Seminar Series is an initiative which began in December 2022, where we are organising regular, in-person seminars, hosted at Imperial College London. These seminars will be broadly on the topic of robot learning, but will also overlap with complementary areas in robotics, machine learning, and computer vision. See below for details of past and upcoming seminars, and I hope to see many of you there from Imperial College and beyond! For enquiries, please contact Edward Johns at e.johns@imperial.ac.uk.

Upcoming Seminars

Nathan Lepora

(University of Bristol)

When? 2pm - 3pm on Wednesday 24th April

Where? Huxley 145 (click here for directions)

Title: Tactile Robot Dexterity

Abstract: In this talk, I discuss how we can make robots more physically dexterous to head towards everyday tasks that humans take for granted with our hands. My lab makes 3d-printed high-resolution soft tactile fingertips that mimic the structure and function of the human sense of touch, which we integrate into robot manipulators, grippers and hands. We also develop perception and control modules that enable these tactile manipulators to feel and interact with their surroundings, demonstrated on tasks such as moving objects around in-hand or pushing objects along surfaces or feeling delicately over complex objects (e.g. a sculpture of a human face). AI methods based on deep learning, e.g. sim-to-real and deep-RL using high-resolution tactile information, are leading to a rapid improvements in robot dexterity, giving optimism that these approaches will scale to human-like dexterity with tactile robot hands.

Speaker Bio: Nathan Lepora received the B.A. degree in Mathematics and the Ph.D. degree in Theoretical Physics from the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, U.K. He is currently a Professor of Robotics and AI with the University of Bristol, Bristol, U.K. He leads the Dexterous Robotics Group in Bristol Robotics Laboratory. Prof. Lepora is a recipient of a Leverhulme Research Leadership Award on ‘A Biomimetic Forebrain for Robot Touch’ and is a CoI on an EPSRC Smart Manufacturing Center and the Horizon Europe project MANiBOT. He coedited the book “Living Machines” that won the 2019 BMA Medical Book Awards (basic and clinical sciences category). His research team won the ‘University Research Project of the Year’ at the 2022 Elektra Awards.

Speaker Webpage: https://lepora.com/