Robotics Seminar @ Illinois
UPCOMING SEMINAR
On Human-Machine Interaction Games
Friday, April 24, 2026
2:00pm Central Time
Talks are held virtually through Zoom
Speaker: Sam Burden (University of Washington)
Our work is broadly motivated by the emergence of learning-based methods in control theory and robotics, with a specific focus on scenarios that have humans in-the-loop with control systems. For instance, learning algorithms are being deployed in semi-autonomous vehicles, robot assistants, brain-machine interfaces, and exoskeletons, where they interact dynamically with a human partner to complete tasks. When learning algorithms are employed in this way, a dynamic game is created that is played between two intelligent agents (the human and machine learners), requiring new techniques to guarantee safety and performance.
We approach this class of problems using tools from control theory and game theory, and conduct human subjects experiments to validate theoretical assumptions and results. This talk will focus on two classes of experiments. In the first, participants perform a reference-tracking task while we apply disturbances and measure feedforward and feedback transformations. In the second, human and machine agents simultaneously adapt to minimize distinct cost functions, and different equilibrium outcomes are obtained based on the machine’s learning algorithms. Our results expose limitations on the transformations people learn and level of reasoning they employ. Future work will use these findings to derive learning-based controllers that augment and amplify human ability.
The Illinois Robotics Group is proud to host the Robotics Seminar @ Illinois series. These seminars provide a diverse lineup of speakers reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of the field of robotics.
We are hosting speakers conducting research in the field of robotics. The talks are given by both professors and students each week, with occasional demonstrations afterwards in the Center for Autonomy Labs housed in the CSL Studio.
Talks are held at 2:00pm CT on Friday’s virtually through Zoom, with some in-person talks viewed in the CSL Studio, 1206 W. Clark Street, Urbana. Talks are held in the conference room (1232), which is just west of the Center for Autonomy Lab facilities.
Please Feel Free to Recommend Speakers for Future Talks
If you have suggestions or questions about the Robotics Seminar @ Illinois series, please feel free to contact John M. Hart, Manager & Coordinator of the Center for Autonomy (CfA) Shared Robotics Laboratories.
Spring 2026 Schedule
February 6, 2026
Speaker: Alexis Block, Case Western Reserve University
Designing for Connection: Social-Physical Human–Robot Interaction and Emotionally Intelligent Technology, 2:00pm, February 6, 2026, In-person event (1232 CSL Studio)
February 13, 2026
Speaker: Sareum Kim, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Designing Living Machines from Dead Matter of Crustacean Exoskeleton, 2:00pm, February 13, 2026, Zoom.
February 20, 2026
Speaker: Tucker Hermans (University of Utah & NVIDIA)
Learning and Planning with Relational Dynamics Models for Robot Manipulation , 2:00, February 20, 2026, Zoom.
February 23-25, 2026
March 6, 2026
Speaker: Dongho Kang (Robotics and AI Institute)
Motion Imitation for Adaptive and Lifelike Control of Legged Robots, 2:00 pm, March 6, 2026, Zoom.
March 13, 2026
Speaker: Wanxin Jin (ASU)
Physics as the Backbone of Dexterity: Scalable Contact Simulation, Contact-Aware Control, and Physics-Grounded Learning , 2:00, March 13, 2026, Zoom.
March 27, 2026
Speaker: Saurabh Gupta (Illinois)
Building Generalizable Mobile Manipulation System , 2:00, March 27, 2026, In-person event (1232 CSL Studio).
April 3, 2026
Speaker: Ahmed Qureshi (Purdue)
Don’t Relearn Physics: Learning Robot Motion with PDE Structure , 2:00, April 3, 2026, In-person event (1232 CSL Studio).
April 10, 2026
Speaker: Kevin Chen (MIT)
Challenges and Opportunities for Insect-Scale Autonomous Aerial Robots, 2:00, April 10, 2026, Zoom.
April 17, 2026
Speaker: Dylan Shell (Texas A&M)
Meta-knowledge about observations in tractable robot planning under uncertainty, 2:00, April 17, 2026, Zoom.
April 24, 2026
Speaker: Sam Burden (University of Washington)
On Human-Machine Interaction Games, 2:00, April 24, 2026, Zoom.
May 1, 2026
Speaker: Robert Wood (Harvard) – Combo Seminar with MiV
Talk title TBD, 2:00, May 1, 2026, Zoom.
May 8, 2026
Speaker: Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee (Cornell)
Talk title TBD, 2:00, May 8, 2026, CSL Studio Conference Room (CSL Studio 1232).
April 24, 2026
On Human-Machine Interaction Games
Sam Burden earned his BS with Honors in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington in Seattle in 2008. He earned his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California in Berkeley in 2014, where he subsequently spent one year as a Postdoctoral Scholar. In 2015, he returned to UW EE (now ECE) as an Assistant Professor, where he received awards for research (Young Investigator Program, Army Research Office, 2016; CAREER, National Science Foundation, M3X program, 2021) and service (Junior Faculty Award, UW College of Engineering, 2021). Sam was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2022 and has served as an Associate Chair for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in 2021–2022 and 2024–2025 and Faculty Development in 2025–2026. He is broadly interested in discovering and formalizing principles of sensorimotor control. Specifically, he focuses on applications in robotics, neuroengineering, and human-AI interaction. Sam lives with chronic illness, and is happy to meet with anyone who identifies as disabled or chronically ill.
April 17, 2026
Meta-knowledge about observations in tractable robot planning under uncertainty
Dylan Shell is a computer scientist at Texas A&M University who works in the areas of robotics and AI. Broadly, his research aims to analyze and synthesize complex, intelligent behavior in systems that interact with the physical world. He has an interest in algorithmic and formal foundations of planning problems, and extremely simple (or minimal) robots. He has published papers on topics from multi-robot task allocation, biologically inspired multiple robot systems, estimation of group-level swarm properties, rigid-body simulation and contact models, and robotic theatre. His work has been funded by DARPA, DoD (ONR, ARL), NSF as well as Ford and 3M; he has been the recipient of teaching, service and reviewing, and research awards. Dylan serves as the President of the Robotics Science and Systems Foundation.
April 10, 2026
Challenges and Opportunities for Insect-Scale Autonomous Aerial Robots
Kevin Chen is an associate professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT, USA. He received his PhD in Engineering Sciences at Harvard University in 2017 and his bachelor’s degree in Applied and Engineering Physics from Cornell University in 2012. His research interests include high bandwidth soft actuators, microrobotics, and aerial robotics. He is a recipient of the Toshio Fukuda Young Professional Award, the Steven Vogel Young Investigator Award, the NSF CAREER Award, the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, multiple best paper awards (TRO 21, RAL 20, IROS 15), and the Ruth and Joel Spira Teaching Excellence Award.
April 3, 2026
Don’t Relearn Physics: Learning Robot Motion with PDE Structure
Ahmed Qureshi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University, where he directs the Cognitive Robot Autonomy and Learning (CoRAL) Lab. His research pursues a physics-first philosophy for robot motion learning: rather than relying on large expert demonstrations or trial-and-error interaction, his group develops methods that embed the governing laws of physics directly into learning algorithms. This approach has produced self-supervised methods that train in minutes, require no expert annotation, and plan in near real-time across high-dimensional, manipulation, and unknown environments. His broader research spans scalable motion planning, dexterous manipulation, active perception, and multi-agent task and motion planning. Dr. Qureshi’s work has been recognized with spotlight and best paper awards at top academic venues. He serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Robotics and IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, and received the Outstanding Associate Editor Award from RA-L in 2024. He has served on the program committees of RSS, ICRA, IROS, and CoRL. He earned his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from NUST, M.S. from Osaka University, and Ph.D. in Intelligent Systems, Robotics, and Control from UC San Diego.
March 27, 2026
Building Generalizable Mobile Manipulation System
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.
March 13, 2026
Physics as the Backbone of Dexterity: Scalable Contact Simulation, Contact-Aware Control, and Physics-Grounded Learning
Wanxin Jin is an Assistant Professor in the School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy at Arizona State University. His research lies at the intersection of robotics, control, and machine learning, with a focus on contact-rich dexterous manipulation, physics-grounded robot learning, and human-centered autonomy. Prior to joining ASU in 2023, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the GRASP Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Purdue University in 2021. His work has appeared in leading robotics and machine learning venues, including T-RO, IJRR, RSS, ICRA, ICML, and NeurIPS. He is an Associate Editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)
March 6, 2026
Motion Imitation for Adaptive and Lifelike Control of Legged Robots
Dongho Kang is a Research Scientist at the Robotics and AI Institute (RAI). His research lies at the intersection of optimal control, reinforcement learning, and data-driven character animation. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science (2025) and his M.S. in Mechanical Engineering (2019) from ETH Zurich. Previously, he obtained his B.S. from Seoul National University with a double major in Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering and Computer Science & Engineering (2016).
February 20, 2026
Learning and Planning with Relational Dynamics Models for Robot Manipulation
Tucker Hermans is an associate professor in the Kahlert School of Computing at the University of Utah, where he is a founding member of the University of Utah Robotics Center. He is also a senior research scientist at NVIDIA. Professor Hermans’ research focuses on autonomous planning, learning, and perception for robot manipulation. His wo which they have no previous knowledge or interaction. Previously, Professor Hermans was a postdoctoral researcher in the Intelligent Autonomous Systems lab at TU Darmstadt in Darmstadt, Germany working with Jan Peters on learning from tactile sensors for manipulation. He was at Georgia Tech from 2009 to 2014 in the School of Interactive Computing where he earned his Ph.D. in Robotics under the supervision of Aaron Bobick and Jim Rehg. He has an A.B. in Computer Science and German from Bowdoin College, as well as an M.Sc. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech.
February 13, 2026
Designing Living Machines from Dead Matter of Crustacean Exoskeleton
Dr. Sareum Kim is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the CREATE Lab at EPFL. She received her B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Seoul National University and her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on developing design methodologies for sustainable robotics by integrating life cycle thinking spanning material sourcing, fabrication, operation, and end of life strategy into robotic systems
February 6, 2026
Designing for Connection: Social-Physical Human–Robot Interaction and Emotionally Intelligent Technology
Dr. Alexis Block is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering at Case Western Reserve University, where she directs the SaPHaRI Lab (Social and Physical Human–Robot Interaction).
December 5, 2025
Unraveling Haptic Acuity in Human-Robot Partnerships
Janelle Clark is currently an assistant professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County leading the Tactile and Robotic Assistance (TARA) Lab.
November 21, 2025
Interaction-Aware Planning and Decision Making
Dr. Tariq is a Senior Research Scientist in the Cooperative Intelligence - Mobility Research group at the Honda Research Institute, US.
November 14, 2025
Toward Advanced Autonomy in Complex Aquatic Environments
Dr. Wei Wang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
NOVEMBER 7, 2025
Towards Open World Robot Safety
Andrea Bajcsy is an Assistant Professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University where she leads the Interactive and Trustworthy Robotics Lab (Intent Lab).
See seminar information
OCTOBER 31, 2025
Illinois Student Talks:
Medical and Surgical Robotic Systems for Increased Access to Healthcare
Adaptive Stress Testing Black-Box LLM Planners
Alexander Smith is a sixth-year MD-PhD student at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine and the Siebel School for Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Neeloy Chakraborty is a fifth-year PhD candidate at the University of Illinois working in the Human-Centered Autonomy Lab.
See seminar information
OCTOBER 17, 2025
Toward Intelligent Manipulation: From Multimodal Sensing to Neural-Symbolic Control
Dr. Yu She is an assistant professor at Purdue University Edwardson School of Industrial Engineering.
OCTOBER 10, 2025
Surgineering Using Intelligent and Flexible Robotic Systems
Dr. Farshid Alambeigi is the Leland Barclay Fellowship in Engineering Associate Professor in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, where he has served since August 2025.
OCTOBER 3, 2025
Engineering Better Robot Learners: Exploration and Exploitation
Dinesh Jayaraman is an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s CIS department and GRASP lab.
SEPTEBER 26, 2025
Diversity in Motion Planning via Parallel Probabilistic Inference
Fabio Ramos is a Professor in robotics and machine learning at the School of Computer Science at the University of Sydney and a Principal Research Scientist at NVIDIA.
SEPTEBER 19, 2025
Digital Agriculture and the Journey Towards Autonomous Machines
Dr. John F. Reid is Executive Director of the Center for Digital Agriculture and Research Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, with joint appointments in the Siebel School of Computing & Data Science, the Department of Agricultural & Biological Engineering, and Electrical and Computer Engineering.