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Center for Autonomy
Enabling high-impact research in autonomous system design
About
The Center for Autonomy (CfA) is Illinois's interdisciplinary hub for autonomy and robotics research and education in the Grainger College of Engineering at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The CfA houses the Master of Engineering in Autonomy and Robotics, manages a number of robotics labs, fosters community, and helps incubate high-impact research endeavors.
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 & RECENT EVENTS
Learning, Hierarchies, and Reduced Order Models
Friday, October 9, 2026
2:00pm Central Time
Zoom Event
Speaker: Steve Heim (Cornell University)
With the advent of ever more powerful compute and learning pipelines that offer robust end-to-end performance, are hierarchical control frameworks with different levels of abstraction still useful? Hierarchical frameworks with reduced-order models (ROMs) have been commonplace in model-based control for robots, primarily to make long-horizon reasoning computationally tractable.
Dr. Heim will discuss some of the other advantages of hierarchies, why we want ROMs as latent dynamics and not simply latent representations, and the importance of matching the time scale to each level of the hierarchy. In particular, Dr. Heim will show some results in learning for legged robots using ROMs with cyclic inductive bias, with both hand-designed and data-driven ROMs. The use of viability measures to estimate the intuitive notion of "how confident/safe is this action" and why this is only useful at the right level of abstraction will be discussed.