Events Calendar

AAI-CCI-MHI Seminar on CPS

Speaker: Shai Revzen, Associate Professor Department of Electrical & Computer Science University of Michigan

Talk Title: More legs are different: the surprising simplicity of multi-legged locomotion

Series: EE598 Seminar Series

Abstract: Most of the animals that move with legs in the world do so with six or more legs, yet humans have focused primarily on bipeds and quadrupeds in designing legged robots. This talk will present some theoretical and experimental results that suggest that multi-legged robots with six or more legs exhibit some surprising properties that challenge our anthropocentric intuitions about locomotion. Modeling multi-legged motion fairly accurately, at single percentage points of relative error, turns out to be much easier than naively expected. This is both due to event-selected hybrid systems resolving multi-contact collisions in a smooth way, and due to the surprisingly high accuracy of geometric mechanics models on dry friction problems to which they shouldn't really apply. Together our results suggest that modeling and learning how to move with many legs might be much easier than has previously been thought.

Biography: Shai Revzen is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in the University of Michigan's College of Engineering, and holds a courtesy faculty appointment in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. He received his PhD in Integrative Biology doing research in the PolyPEDAL Lab at the University of California at Berkeley, and did his postdoctoral work in the GRASP Laboratory of the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to his academic work, Shai spent a decade in the tech industry, rising to Chief Architect R&D of the convergent systems division of Harmonic Lightwaves (HLIT). He is currently co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Acculine Medical, and General Manager of his consulting company, Izun, Inc. In his spare time he does martial arts and studies for a JD Law degree at Wayne State University.

Host: Feifei Qian

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Ariana Perez