The Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics

Welcome

The Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics (LPR) is in the Computer Science Department here at UMass. You can find specific information here about LPR research, facilities, publications, personnel, demos, announcements, and bibliography information. LPR's research areas include dexterous manipulation (reaching and grasping), mobile robot navigation, geometric reasoning, assembly planning, and the application of learning theory to robotics. Some of the pages below contain mpeg movies of various robot lab demos. These are marked with this icon:

If you want to skip the technical details, visit our Video Page (bring your own popcorn). You can also take a free-form tour of the lab, or you can start with the local map of the lab. In addition, we maintain an internet resources page for robotics.

What's New in the LPR pages.

We also have a Web Chart linking other Web pages here at UMass, and we have a copyright.

Faculty

: Prof. Rod Grupen, Co-director
: Prof. Robin Popplestone, Co-director
Other Laboratory Personnel

Purpose

The Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics (LPR), under the direction of Professors Rod Grupen and Robin Popplestone, and the Center for Automated, Real-Time Systems (CARTS) at the University of Massachusetts is focused on new technologies to control robots in uncertain and unstructured environments. These efforts include techniques for acquiring geometric information on-line, sensor-based systems for robot manipulator control and mobile platform navigation, methods for reacting to sensor information during assembly operations, geometric reasoning for automated assembly planning, and adaptive controllers which acquire skill in assembly tasks.

Facilities

The lab is equipped with two General Electric P50 robots, two GE A4s, a Zebra Zero, and a customized MRI mobile platform. In addition, the P50s are fitted with a 4-fingered Utah/MIT and a 3-fingered Salisbury dexterous hand, respectively. The lab includes VxWorks/VME-based distributed controllers and an experimental real-time kernel (Spring kernel).

P50 robot equipped with the Utah/MIT hand (click to enlarge). This robot is used for coarse reaching and grasping research (see those pages for mpeg movies).

MRI mobile platform.

Zebra Zero robot with force sensor. This robot is used for contact assembly planning and learning.

Research

Research conducted at the lab includes:

controller composition for coordinating multiple robots
grasp planning
geometric reasoning for robust assembly & fine motion control
learning admittance control and path optimization
biological models of motor planning
proprioceptive, tactile, & visual model acquisition
motion planning, coarse reaching
state-space decomposition
flexible manufacturing (research done in the context of CARTS)

The laboratory also engages in collaborative research with the Computer Vision (A. Hanson, E. Riseman, directors) and Adaptive Networks (A. Barto, director) groups within the department. The lab also interacts with the Spring Kernel group (J. Stankovic and K. Ramamritham, directors) applying Spring Kernel concepts to real-time control for Robotics.

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CIC

Last Update: 8/17/94