Mechanical and Civil Engineering: PhD Thesis Defense

Abstract: Fueled in part by the imagination of science fiction, every decade since the 1950s has expected robots to enter our everyday lives in the subsequent decade. Despite this anticipation, the widespread adoption of robots has consistently fallen short of societal expectations. This delay is attributable to the sheer variety of complexities in robotics -- perception, contact-rich dynamics, human-robot interactions -- each sub-discipline of robotics poses a unique challenge that must be addressed to achieve general autonomy. As progress is made in these sub-fields, it is increasingly important to adopt a hierarchical perspective that combines isolated controller blocks into a unified framework. This talk will argue that on the road to general autonomy, adopting a hierarchical perspective enables three key benefits: efficiency, feasibility, and generalizability. We will root our discussion in a general problem in robotics: the design of a controller that navigates a robot to a goal state while satisfying all state and input constraints that are present. Throughout, we focus on solutions that are both general -- applicable across a wide variety of robotic platforms -- and concrete -- deployed and tested on specific hardware platforms. An emphasis will be placed on mathematical structure, constructive synthesis, and experimental validation, and along the way we will demonstrate that adopting a hierarchical perspective is not merely an implementation convenience, but a fundamental organizing principle that can enable true robot autonomy.