Events

Wearable robots offer immense, untapped potential to enhance human performance by synergistically combining human and robotic abilities. These systems are powerful tools for assisting individuals with motor disabilities, delivering high-intensity rehabilitation therapy, and augmenting human capabilities—such as in shared-autonomy tasks or through supernumerary limbs. 

Exciting new technological developments, like improved sensing and data-driven approaches for modeling, are driving the rapid progress of this field. This talk explores these advances through the lens of our work at the CHRP Lab at Rice University, with a focus on exoskeletons. 

We discuss applications in both upper-limb and lower-limb domains—including upper-limb training and rehabilitation, lower-limb assistance, and adaptive interactions for personalized training—with user populations including able-bodied adults, adults with stroke, and pediatric patients with motor impairments due to neurodevelopmental disorders such as cerebral palsy. 

Dr. Ghonasgi also highlights how prior work has motivated ongoing projects in upper-limb telerehabilitation, functional assistance, lower-limb skill training, and home-based pediatric rehabilitation. The overarching goal of this research is to realize intelligent wearable devices that empower humans to overcome and move beyond their physical limits.

Keya Ghonasgi is an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department and an affiliate of the Neuroengineering Initiative at Rice University. She is also a member of the Ken Kennedy Institute for Responsible AI and the TIRR Foundation’s Mission Connect. 

At Rice, Dr. Ghonasgi directs the Cognitive Human-Robot Partnership (CHRP) Lab, which develops next-generation intelligent wearable technologies to assist, rehabilitate, and augment human abilities. 

She received her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2023 and her M.S. from Columbia University in 2018. Following her doctoral research, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research has been supported by NSF and NIH grants, as well as collaborations with Meta Reality Labs and Google Brain. 

Dr. Ghonasgi has received recognition as a 2022 Rising Star in Mechanical Engineering and a 2023 Caltech Young Investigator Lecturer.

Prevailing models in robotics reason about the world either as images (end-to-end learning approaches) or as a collection of rigid objects (classical approaches), but neither have proven to be suitable abstractions for manipulating cloth, ropes, piles of objects, plants, and natural terrain. Dr. Hauser’s lab is investigating novel representations of “stuff” built de novo from visual and tactile perception data, with properties learned continuously through interaction. 

Volumetric Stiffness Fields, Graph Neural Networks, Neural Dynamics, and 3D metric-semantic maps are examples of models that allow robots to learn about their environment without preconceived notions of individual objects, their physical properties, or how they interact. Across domains such as agriculture, construction, and household object manipulation, these techniques model complex interactions, uncertainty, and multi-modal correlations between appearance and physical properties. 

(This talk solely represents the research and opinions of Dr. Hauser under his UIUC affiliation, and does not communicate any results, statements, or opinions on behalf of Samsung Research America, Samsung Electronics, or any affiliates.)

Kris Hauser is the Head of Robotic Intelligence at Samsung Research America while on leave as a Professor in the Siebel School for Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2008 and bachelor’s degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics from UC Berkeley in 2003. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley before joining the faculty at Indiana University (2009–2014), where he founded the Intelligent Motion Lab, and later at Duke University (2014–2019). 

He also consulted for Google’s autonomous-driving company, Waymo (2019–2023). Dr. Hauser is a recipient of the Stanford Graduate Fellowship, Siebel Scholar Fellowship, NSF CAREER Award, three Amazon Research Awards, and the Best Paper Award at IEEE Humanoids 2015. His research interests include open-world robotics, robot motion planning and control, and semi-autonomous systems, with applications in intelligent vehicles, robotic manipulation, robot-assisted medicine, and legged locomotion.