Professors Niekum, Thomaz, Sentis, Mooney, and Stone, along with their students and postdocs, are banding together to create a joint entry in the new RoboCup@Home Standard Platform League using the Toyota HSR robot.The competition will be the last week of July in Nagoya, Japan.

Joydeep Biswas presented "Making High-Performance Robots Safe and Easy to Use for an Introduction to Computing" at the EAAI (Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence) symposium, co-located with the AAAI conference, in NYC. The paper (co-authored by Joseph Spitzer and Arjun Guha from UMass Amherst) details a platform that they built to use high-performance soccer robots for introduction to computing workshops.

Ann Majewicz Feywill be joining our Department of Mechanical Engineering. She is coming to us from a professorship at UT Dallas. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2014, and specializes in dynamic systems and control, medical and surgical robots, teleoperation, and haptics.

David Fridovich-Keil will be joining our Department of Aerospace Engineering. He has receive his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and specializes in robust optimal control, motion planning, differential game theory, and safe autonomy.

With collaborators from Charles River Analytics and UMass Amherst, the Autonomous Mobile Robotics Laboratory at UT Austin will be undertaking research on how robots can build competency models of their perception algorithms in novel environments, and provide human-interpretable meaningful evidence to support such competency assessments.

Peter Stone had two papers accepted at the IJCAI (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence): "A Penny for Your Thoughts: The Value of Communication in Ad Hoc Teamwork" was co-authored by Reuth Mirsky, William Macke, Andy Wang, and Harel Yedidsion. The second paper "Balancing Individual Preferences with Shared Objectives in Multiagent Cooperation" was co-authored by Ishan Durugkar and Elad Liebman.

The South Wing facilities, which opened on May 5th, include our Heavy Robotics Bay, robotic rehabilitation lab spaces for patients recovering from strokes or injuries, and the spaces for our robotics machine and electronics shops (the equipment is currently being purchased) on the first floor.

The Role of the Control Framework for Continuous Teleoperation of a Brain-Machine Interface-Driven Mobiile Robot.
L. Tonin, F. C. Bauer, J. Millán.

Dynamic Locomotion For Passive-Ankle Biped Robots And Humanoids Using Whole-Body Locomotion Control
D. Kim, S. Jorgensen, J. Lee, J. Ahn, J. Luo, and L. Sentis.