Steve McGuire "Improving Resilience in Human-Robot Systems"

4:00 pm
Monday, February 5, 2024
190 Goodwin Hall
Faculty Host:  Dr. Rakesh Kapania

Abstract:  Robotic systems in field deployments often reveal limitations and failure modes that are not evident from laboratory testing. These needs are motivated by real-world demonstrations, such as the recent DARPA Subterranean Challenge. This talk covers a range of projects of interest to the aerospace community, including precision agriculture with UAVs, human-robot interaction in space systems, and remote sensing in planetary robotics. Work in progress includes survey planning reflectance modeling for stressed plants, deriving forestry health parameters such as diameter-at-breast height, and estimating cognitive states from passive biosignal measurements. These projects develop improved sim-to-real modeling techniques and leverage recent advances in machine learning such as neural radiance fields and transformer architectures to deliver improved performance outcomes. 

Bio:  Dr. Steve McGuire is an assistant professor within the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering department at the University of California Santa Cruz. He earned his M.S. (2016) and Ph.D. (2019) at the University of Colorado at Boulder in Aerospace Engineering after a career in the Marine Corps where he served as a helicopter pilot. Building on his work in human-robot interaction as a NASA Space Technology Research fellow, his Human-Aware Robotic Exploration group investigates modern challenges in field robotics involving human interaction. He previously was a co-investigator on the 3rd place DARPA Subterranean Challenge team, earning $500k in prize money developing and validating novel solutions for exploring underground environments. His research focuses on improving organic capabilities of field robots and teaching robots to learn about their human teammates. His research has been supported by NASA, USDA, ONR, DARPA, and industry.