Home
Center for Autonomy
Enabling high-impact research in autonomous system design
About the Center for Autonomy
Located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Center for Autonomy will enable high-impact research and develop new educational programs for students and professionals. The Center will play an important role in designing innovative systems that can function autonomously, or without human intervention, in a safe and reliable way.
From self-driving cars to intelligent robotic assistants to remote surgical systems, autonomous technology will revolutionize the way we live, work, and play. In order to enable this revolution, however, advancements in foundational research and workforce development must first take place to provide assured and certified-safe performance.
Application areas include:
UPCOMING SEMINAR
Building Generalizable Mobile Manipulation System
Friday, March 27, 2026
2:00pm Central Time
Speaker: Saurabh Gupta (UIUC)
In Person Event, CSL Studio 1232
What does it take to build mobile manipulation systems that can competently operate on previously unseen objects in previously unseen environments? In this talk, I will present recent case studies on building two such systems: one for interacting with articulated objects using a wheeled manipulator, and another for whole-body object grasping using a humanoid robot. I will discuss findings from large-scale real-world evaluations and distill key principles for building generalizable mobile manipulation systems, including a central one: that the best results come from marrying classical robotics principles with large-scale learning, rather than treating them as competing paradigms, at least for now.
Saurabh Gupta is an Associate Professor in the ECE Department at UIUC. Before starting at UIUC in 2019, he received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2018 and spent the following year as a Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research in Pittsburgh. His research interests span computer vision, robotics, and machine learning, with a focus on building agents that can intelligently interact with the physical world around them.