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
Physical Intelligence for Physical Care: Towards Stakeholder-Informed Caregiving Robots in the Real World
Friday, May 8, 2026
2:00pm Central Time
In Person Event - 1232 CSL Studio
Speaker: Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee (Cornell University)
How can we build robots that meaningfully assist people with mobility limitations in their daily lives? To support complex caregiving tasks such as robot-assisted feeding, bathing, transferring, and meal preparation, robots must physically interact with people and objects in dynamic, unstructured environments while maintaining safety. In this talk, I will present an overview of projects from the EmPRISE Lab that showcase fundamental advances in physical robot caregiving. I will highlight how we design stakeholder-informed systems with personalized contact-rich control policies and user functionality- and behavior-aware physical robot assistance. I will also share insights from deploying these systems with real users in real-world settings. Together, these efforts move us closer to building caregiving robots that are not only technically capable, but are also safe, deployable, and responsive to the real needs of people in care settings.