March 1, 2023: Minghui Zheng

March 1, 2023
1:30 p.m.
Room: 310 Kelly Hall
Minghui Zheng, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Buffalo
Faculty Host: Dr. Riley Fitzgerald 

"Robotics at the Intersection of Learning and Control"

Abstract:  Robotics technologies are moving towards operating in unstructured environments with the capabilities of continuously learning from and collaborating with humans and other robots. This talk will discuss our recent studies on advancing such capabilities towards overcoming several fundamental limitations such as adaptability and customizability in robotics. The first part of this talk will focus on learning-based control for drones, where I will introduce a learning framework that can enable a newly built drone to learn from existing ones despite their different dynamics and platforms. This aims to significantly reduce the design, testing, evaluation, and certification of drones that are uniquely customized for applications in their operating environment. The second part of this talk will focus on human-robot collaboration for e-waste disassembly and recycling, towards designing an economically viable disassembly system for the remanufacturing industry. I will focus on task planning among humans and robots, human motion prediction with quantified uncertainties, and robotic motion planning. I will also briefly discuss their potential applications in aerospace engineering.

Bio:  Dr. Minghui Zheng is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University at Buffalo (UB).  Before joining UB, she received her Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 2017. Dr. Zheng’s research interest lies in learning, planning, and control with applications to several areas that are of vital importance to robotics, manufacturing, and aerospace. Her research endeavors are supported by approximately 2M dollars in funding from agencies such as NSF and DOE, and have been delivered in over 30 journal articles. She is currently an associate editor of the IFAC journal of Mechatronics, and has frequently and continuously served as the associate editor or program committee for several major conferences of her field such as the American Control Conferences. She received the CAREER award on learning-based robotic control from the NSF Foundational Research in Robotics program and the SEAS Early Career Researcher of the Year from UB in 2021.