Friday, December 5, 2025 - 3:00pm
Event Calendar Category
Other LIDS Events
Speaker Name
Nancy Pollard
Affiliation
CMU
Building and Room number
45-230
"Bringing Dexterity to Robot Hands in the Real World"
Dexterous manipulation is a grand challenge of robotics, and fine manipulation skills are required for many applications we envision, from personal robots to manufacturing to agriculture to health care. This talk considers what it will take to finally achieve “last-mile” dexterous manipulation for applications such as these. I will discuss compliance, areas of contact, transfer of demonstrations from people to robots, and how we can design robots for greater dexterity. The goal of the talk is to demonstrate factors that contribute to dexterity and discuss how we can incorporate them into our robots and systems.
Nancy Pollard is a Professor in the Robotics Institute and the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where she developed grasp and manipulation planning algorithms for dexterous hands. Prof. Pollard spent the next few decades studying human and robot dexterity, with emphasis on bringing human manipulation strategies with performance guarantees to humanoid robots with dexterous hands. She received the NSF CAREER award for research on “Quantifying Humanlike Enveloping Grasps”, the Okawa Research Grant for "Studies of Dexterity for Computer Graphics and Robotics," and was a recent recipient of an NSF Convergence Accelerator award for "Bio-Inspired Design of Robot Hands for Use-Driven Dexterity." She has led the development of several generations of dexterous soft robotic hands, is a founder of FuturHand Robotics and leads the CMU Foam Hands Laboratory.
Sponsors: A big shoutout to our sponsors, which are making this semester’s robotics seminars possible! We are pleased to have three amazing sponsors supporting the MIT Robotics Seminars this semester: Skydio, Symbotic, and Amazon. Skydio (https://www.skydio.com/) is a leader in vision-based autonomous navigation (and more!) for drones. Symbotic (https://www.symbotic.com/) is redesigning the future of warehouse automation with mobile robots (just a few miles from MIT!). Amazon (https://www.amazon.science/research-areas/robotics) is building new kinds of GenAI for robotics as they grow towards 1M deployed warehouse robots.