Erickson Earns NSF CAREER Award
Zackory Erickson, an assistant professor at the Robotics Institute in Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, has earned a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award. The program recognizes early career faculty who show exemplary dedication to their institution’s mission and act as academic role models.
Erickson’s project, “Scaling Up Physical Human-Robot Interaction With Generative Simulation,” addresses one of the biggest challenges to helping robots safely and effectively interact with people: lack of realistic training data.
Rather than relying on limited real-world interactions to train robots, the project will develop a new research framework called “Generative Simulation for Physical Human-Robot Interaction.” The framework will enable robots to learn from a virtually unlimited supply of automatically generated, physically realistic interaction scenarios. These simulations will allow robots to learn and be tested in a wide range of situations before working with people, advancing applications in areas such as assistive robotics, healthcare and collaborative manufacturing.
The project will also develop artificial intelligence methods that help robots adapt to human behavior while identifying and correcting potential safety issues before systems are deployed in the real world.
“Ultimately, the research aims to produce safer, more generalizable robot control systems for physical human-robot interaction and to release open-source software and benchmarks for the robotics community,” Erickson said. “The CAREER award gives us the opportunity to train the next generation of experts that push the bounds of robotic technology capable of interacting with and assisting humans.”
Erickson will also integrate the work into both robotics courses at CMU and a summer program for high school students, giving learners hands-on experience developing AI for safety-critical robotic systems.
For More Information: Aaron Aupperlee | 412-268-9068 | aaupperlee@cmu.edu