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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
Sight for Scale, Sound for Touch: Fusing Internet Video with Acoustic Feedback for Dexterous Robotics
Friday, October 23, 2026
2:00pm Central Time
Zoom Event
Speaker: Jeff Ichnowski (Carnegie Mellon)
Achieving human-like dexterity and broad real-world generalization remains one of modern robotics' grand challenges. While learning directly from internet-scale, “in-the-wild” human videos offers a powerful way to bootstrap multi-finger trajectories, vision alone remains blind to contact microphysics and often struggles with self-occlusion and missing tactile forces. This talk explores an exciting frontier at this intersection, pairing the macro-level behavioral scale of internet video with the micro-physical grounding of sound. We will examine how we can extract complex dexterous priors from web-scale data, and how vibrotactile and acoustic sensing—using both active skin-conduction tracking and passive slip detection—can provide the real-time, high-frequency feedback needed to stabilize these movements. Rather than relying on vision alone, this work points toward a future where robots learn what to do by watching the web, and how to do it by listening to the world.