Hi, my name is Ross Hartley, I'm a PhD
candidate at the University of Michigan
in Robotics. Yeah, I do research on state
estimation and control of walking robots.
So essentially how do we get robots or
walking robots to balance while they're
walking and also how do they track their
position as they move around the world
while simultaneously building up maps of
the world around it. The impact of my
research is to allow legged robots
become more capable so they can walk
around in terrain that is inaccessible
to wheeled robots, such as you know
walking up hills or walking over rocks
and things like that, going up staircases,
so this is gonna be really helpful in
helping in search-and-rescue missions
and also to help package delivery and
things like that. I've had a great
opportunity to lead a collaboration
between Jesse Grizzle’s lab and Ryan Eustice’s
lab to add perception capabilities
to the Cassie robot. This is great
because without vision, a walking robot is
really blind while it's walking around
in the world and it kind of limits the
capabilities of the robots, so by
allowing the robot to see the terrain we
can improve both the stability of the
controller and allow for general
Autonomy. The one thing I'll take away
from my time in Michigan is really the
need to collaborate with other students
and other people in different
subfields of robotics and engineering
because I think that's the best way to
learn and to innovate and I think if
we're gonna build intelligent machines
in the future that's what we're going to
need
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