Fall 2026 GRASP on Robotics: Howie Choset, Carnegie Mellon University, “Snakes, Search, and Space: Taming Many Degrees of Freedom”

About this event

This will be an in-person event ONLY in Wu and Chen Auditorium.

ABSTRACT

Robots with many degrees of freedom can achieve remarkable capabilities, but realizing that potential requires methods that make complex, high-dimensional systems tractable, controllable, and useful. This talk will describe how my group designs, senses, plans for, and deploys high-DoF robotic systems, including snake robots, multi-agent systems, and modular robots. Each class of system draws on different foundations: geometric mechanics for snake robot locomotion, deferred planning and ergodic search for multi-agent systems, and learning-based methods for modular robots. Although there is no single unifying theory across these approaches, they share a common principle: reducing complex, high-dimensional problems to lower-dimensional representations that can be analyzed, controlled, and exploited. We evaluate these ideas by building complete robotic systems and testing them in demanding real-world settings. The resulting technologies have been deployed in applications ranging from minimally invasive surgery and urban search and rescue to manufacturing, municipal infrastructure, and assembly and servicing in space. I will begin the talk by discussing the six companies and one national manufacturing institute that my colleagues and I co-founded to translate these technologies from research into practice.

From General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Lab