Bios of Organizers

Aaron Edsinger-Gonzales is a doctoral candidate in the Humanoid Robotics Group at MIT with Professor Rodney Brooks. His research interests are in ontogenetic and behavior based cognitive architectures for bimanual humanoid manipulation, compliant manipulator and hand design, and novel sensing and actuator technologies.

Paul Fitzpatrick is a Postdoctoral Lecturer at MIT CSAIL. He received his M.Eng. in Computer Engineering from the University of Limerick, Ireland, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT for work addressing developmental approaches to machine perception on a humanoid robot. He is currently working on novel methods of perception for manipulation.

Eduardo Torres-Jara received his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Escuela Politecnica del Ejercito, Ecuador, and his M.S. from MIT in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at MIT CSAIL. His current research interest is "sensitive manipulation". Manipulation that is as much about perception as action and which is intrinsically responsive to the properties of the object being manipulated. He is also interested in force actuators and dense tactile sensing.

Relevant Publications

• Rodney Brooks and Lijin Aryananda and Aaron Edsinger and Paul Fitzpatrick and Charles Kemp and Una-May O'Reilly and Eduardo Torres-Jara and Paulina Varshavskaya and Jeff Weber. Sensing and manipulating built-for-human environments. International Journal of Humanoid Robotics. 1(1):pp1-28. 2004
• Paul Fitzpatrick and Giorgio Metta. Grounding vision through experimental manipulation. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Mathematical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences, 361:1811, pp. 2165-2185.
• Aaron Edsinger-Gonzales and Jeff Weber. Domo: A Force Sensing Humanoid Robot for Manipulation Research. Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE International Conference on Humanoid Robots
• Eduardo Torres-Jara and Jessica Banks. A simple and scalable force actuator. Proceedings of the 2004 International Symposium on Robotics
• Aaron Edsinger-Gonzales. Design of a Compliant and Force Sensing Hand for a Humanoid Robot. Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent Manipulation and Grasping. 2004
• Paul Fitzpatrick and Eduardo Torres-Jara. The power of the dark side: using cast shadows for visually-guided reaching. Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE International Conference on Humanoid Robots
• Giorgio Metta and Paul Fitzpatrick. Early integration of vision and manipulation. Adaptive Behavior, 11:2, pp. 109-128, June 2003.
• Paul Fitzpatrick, Giorgio Metta, Lorenzo Natale, Sajit Rao, Giulio Sandini. Learning about objects through action - initial steps towards artificial cognition. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Taipei, Taiwan, May 12 - 17, 2003.