Title: Unifying Semantic and Physical Intelligence for Generalist Humanoid Robots
Abstract: Humanoid robots offer two unparalleled advantages in general-purpose embodied intelligence. First, humanoids are built as generalist robots that can potentially do all the tasks humans can do in complex environments. Second, the embodiment alignment between humans and humanoids allows for the seamless integration of human cognitive skills with versatile humanoid capabilities. To build generalist humanoids, there are three critical aspects of intelligence: (1) Semantic intelligence (how the robot understands the world and reasons); (2) Physical/Motion intelligence (locomotion and manipulation skills); and (3) Mechanical/Hardware intelligence (how the robot actuates and senses). In this talk, I will present some recent works (H2O, OmniH2O, WoCoCo, ABS) that aim to unify semantic and physical intelligence for humanoid robots. In particular, H2O and OmniH2O provide a universal and dexterous interface that enables diverse human control (e.g., VR, RGB) and autonomy (e.g., using imitation learning or VLMs) methods for humanoids, WoCoCo provides an efficient framework for loco-manipulation skill learning without motion priors, and ABS provides safety guarantees for agile vision-based locomotion control. Finally, I will briefly discuss how to combine learning-based control approaches and traditional model-based control approaches to get the best of two worlds.
Bio: Sam Burden earned his BS with Honors in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington in Seattle in 2008. He earned his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California in Berkeley in 2014, where he subsequently spent one year as a Postdoctoral Scholar. In 2015, he returned to UW EE (now ECE) as an Assistant Professor, where he received awards for research (Young Investigator Program, Army Research Office, 2016; CAREER, National Science Foundation, M3X program, 2021) and service (Junior Faculty Award, UW College of Engineering, 2021). Sam served as his Department’s (first) Associate Chair for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in 2021–2022 and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2022. He is broadly interested in discovering and formalizing principles of sensorimotor control. Specifically, he focuses on applications in robotics, neuroengineering, and (human-)cyber-physical systems. Sam lives with chronic illness, and is happy to meet with anyone who identifies as disabled or chronically ill.