Odest Chadwicke Jenkins
Dr. Odest Chadwicke Jenkins is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Brown University. His research group, Robotics, Learning and Autonomy at Brown, explores topics related to human-robot interaction and robot learning, with a specific focus on robot learning from human demonstration. Their research strives towards realizing robots and autonomous systems as effective collaborators for humans to pursue their endeavors.
Dr. Jenkins's research into robot learning from demonstration, or robot LfD, centers on the automated discovery of processes underlying human movement and decision making. In recent years, robot LfD has emerged as a compelling alternative, where robots are programmed implicitly from a user's demonstration rather than explicitly through an intermediate form (e.g., hardcoded program) or task-unrelated secondary skills (e.g., computer programming). The role of learning, in this case, is the estimation of a human's intended control policy or movement process from demonstrated examples.
Towards this goal, his work has contributed methods in manifold learning, a form of nonparametric dimension reduction, for uncovering dynamical processes and underlying structure in nonlinear time-series data. These methods have been applied to human motion for learning motion primitives, or predictive dynamical motion priors. Dr. Jenkins's group has learned and applied these primitives in several domains, including humanoid robot control, vision-based human tracking, and sparse user control of prosthetic devices.
More recently, Dr. Jenkins and his group have taken this work in a new direction for learning robot controllers from human demonstration through algorithms and models for nonparametric regression with infinite mixtures of experts. Their goal for this work is to extend robot LfD beyond applicability to constrained scenarios and towards the ability to learn any finite state automata from users. As such, they aim to elevate robot LfD to be on par or better than with manual coding for developing robot controllers.
Dr. Jenkins also addresses research problems in robot/computer perception, humanoid robotics, machine learning, autonomous control, dexterous manipulation, computer animation and game development.
http://www.cs.brown.edu/~cjenkins/
| tour request | contact irobot | privacy policy | terms & conditions |  |