[Announcement] Our inaugural AEP seminar will be held on Thursday, September 3, at 3:00 PM-4:00 PM. Dr. Frankie Zhu from the University of Hawaii at Manoa will give a talk titled: “Autonomous Robots Learning Dynamics and Control in Extreme Environments”.
Abstract – Exploring extreme terrain is pertinent for extraplanetary surface exploration and search and rescue missions here on Earth. These high-risk operations are best carried out by autonomous robots, minimizing harm to humans. In this talk, I will describe the difficulties associated with robots traversing extreme terrain and proposed an autonomy architecture. The robot follows an encoded procedure of objective synthesis, path planning, adaptive dynamics modeling and control policy generation. I will expand upon each of the procedural steps in the robot’s autonomous exploration algorithm and tell this robot’s story in the context of lunar surface mission seeking ice.
Dr. Frankie Zhu has been a tenure-track assistant research faculty at University of Hawaii at Manoa in the Space Systems field and an Associate Director of Hawai’i Space Grant Consortium since 2020 (the beginning of this year). Her research interests are dynamics, controls, systems engineering, and machine learning for space applications. Frankie strives to explore and learn about our universe through and beside intelligent robotic systems. She received my Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering in 2014, her Master of Science in aerospace engineering in 2017, and received her PhD in aerospace engineering in 2019 all at Cornell University. She’s also looking for a graduate student with the same research interests!