From The School of Engineering and Applied Science
At
5.13.24
William Weir
Teaching robots to adapt to their environments has proven tricky. Using advanced AI systems, a Yale researcher is making robots more adaptive and independent.
Ian Abraham
Humans and animals are incredibly adept when it comes to adapting to their environments. For example, when humans step on ice, it only takes a few shuffles of our feet for us to learn to glide. Instilling similar adaptive abilities in robots, though, has proven tricky. Typically, immense amounts of data and computation are needed for robots to even approach the nimble ways of humans and animals navigating their surroundings.
Ian Abraham, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering & materials science at Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science, has a better way. He is leveraging artificial intelligence to help robots reason and learn from their surroundings to quickly develop new skills on their own. Using everything from robot swarms to robotic dogs to rat whiskers, he’s developing physically embodied, he’s developing physically embodied AI systems that — by interacting with their environments — explore, play, and exhibit curiosity. With these tools the robots can make their way in the wild with dexterity and agility.
In the first of a series of conversations about AI with Yale researchers, Abraham discusses his work on making robots more adaptive and independent.
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How does AI figure into your work?
Ian Abraham: I see AI as a system that can act and is able to retrieve information, and then do something with that information at the level of what a human is capable of. My work probably goes beyond that, as it looks at how the physical embodiment of AI — for example, a robot — would go about collecting data and information about the world. A lot of the work in my Ph.D., and now as well, is inspired by rats and how they navigate in their environment and use their whiskers to interact with objects: That is, how do the mechanics of whiskers influence how rats go about exploring and understanding their world? We took those insights and applied them to control theory, where the goal is to optimize behaviors that leverage the mechanical interactions in order to do things like navigate or learn about object properties like textures and curvature. We pushed it a bit further to then think about specific motor skills, like manipulation, walking — all these things that are related to robotics.
How did you measure what the whiskers were doing?
Abraham: We literally had tiny little rat whiskers and put them on motors. We had these custom, tiny little force sensors that would go at the base of the rat whiskers and rotate the whiskers to hit objects, where we would measure forces that way. We also had these really high-fidelity models of the rat whisker system that would create a simulation, and we would try to predict how the whisker was bending, and then model that and then predict the forces at the base of the whisker.
One of the takeaways was that mechanical contact, even with a tiny whisker, is incredibly informative. Just getting into contact with an object tells us so much about the object. Then consecutively hitting that object the way rats do with their whiskers refines what we know already about the object we’re interacting with. You have to move them to interact with the world. Same with robots. Stationary robots are useless — I need robots to move to do something meaningful in the world. I want the robot to understand how to manipulate objects by interacting with objects. I need to have the robot think about the data to collect from that object to manipulate it .
Beyond your own projects, this could benefit the robotics field in general, right?
Abraham: That’s the hope. If it works, you can get some really impressive capabilities out of robots. My group has preliminary results that have demonstrated some of these abilities. We have a little hopping robot simulation where the question was: How do you learn how to hop? We found that it just takes a couple of the “right” hops to not only figure out all the mechanics of hopping, but then how to propel forward at pretty high speeds that yield very natural locomotion.
So it’s taking data and then using that to learn how to navigate the rest of the world.
Abraham: Exactly. What we’re interested in is how do we even come up with that data to begin with? The way most AI systems are being developed is you have a bucket of data that you put into a machine-learning process, and it spits out an AI. We’re asking, what if the AI can actually collect the data? What does that mean about the system, and where do we go from there?
See the full article here .
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The School of Engineering & Applied Science is the engineering school of Yale University. When the first professor of civil engineering was hired in 1852, a Yale School of Engineering was established within the Yale Scientific School, and in 1932 the engineering faculty organized as a separate, constituent school of the university. The school currently offers undergraduate and graduate classes and degrees in electrical engineering, chemical engineering, computer science, applied physics, environmental engineering, biomedical engineering, and mechanical engineering and materials science.
Yale University is a private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine Colonial Colleges chartered before the American Revolution. The Collegiate School was renamed Yale College in 1718 to honor the school’s largest private benefactor for the first century of its existence, Elihu Yale. Yale University is consistently ranked as one of the top universities and is considered one of the most prestigious in the nation.
Chartered by Connecticut Colony, the Collegiate School was established in 1701 by clergy to educate Congregational ministers before moving to New Haven in 1716. Originally restricted to theology and sacred languages, the curriculum began to incorporate humanities and sciences by the time of the American Revolution. In the 19th century, the college expanded into graduate and professional instruction, awarding the first PhD in the United States in 1861 and organizing as a university in 1887. Yale’s faculty and student populations grew after 1890 with rapid expansion of the physical campus and scientific research.
Yale is organized into fourteen constituent schools: the original undergraduate college, the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and twelve professional schools. While the university is governed by the Yale Corporation, each school’s faculty oversees its curriculum and degree programs. In addition to a central campus in downtown New Haven, the university owns athletic facilities in western New Haven, a campus in West Haven, Connecticut, and forests and nature preserves throughout New England. The Yale University Library, serving all constituent schools, holds more than 15 million volumes and is the third-largest academic library in the United States. Students compete in intercollegiate sports as the Yale Bulldogs in the NCAA Division I – Ivy League.
A number of Nobel laureates, Fields Medalists, Abel Prize laureates, and Turing award winners have been affiliated with Yale University. In addition, Yale has graduated many notable alumni, including U.S. Presidents, U.S. Supreme Court Justices, a number of living billionaires, and many heads of state. Hundreds of members of Congress and many U.S. diplomats, many MacArthur Fellows, Rhodes Scholars, Marshall Scholars, and Mitchell Scholars have been affiliated with the university.
Research
Yale is a member of the Association of American Universities and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”.
Yale’s faculty include a number of members of the National Academy of Sciences , the National Academy of Engineering and members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . The college is, after normalization for institution size, the tenth-largest baccalaureate source of doctoral degree recipients in the United States, and the largest such source within the Ivy League.
Yale’s English and Comparative Literature departments were part of the New Criticism movement. Of the New Critics, Robert Penn Warren, W.K. Wimsatt, and Cleanth Brooks were all Yale faculty. Later, the Yale Comparative literature department became a center of American deconstruction. Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, taught at the Department of Comparative Literature from the late seventies to mid-1980s. Several other Yale faculty members were also associated with deconstruction, forming the so-called “Yale School”. These included Paul de Man who taught in the Departments of Comparative Literature and French, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman (both taught in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature), and Harold Bloom (English), whose theoretical position was always somewhat specific, and who ultimately took a very different path from the rest of this group. Yale’s history department has also originated important intellectual trends. Historians C. Vann Woodward and David Brion Davis are credited with beginning in the 1960s and 1970s an important stream of southern historians; likewise, David Montgomery, a labor historian, advised many of the current generation of labor historians in the country. Yale’s Music School and Department fostered the growth of Music Theory in the latter half of the 20th century. The Journal of Music Theory was founded there in 1957; Allen Forte and David Lewin were influential teachers and scholars.
In addition to eminent faculty members, Yale research relies heavily on the presence of a large number of postdocs from various national and international origin working in the multiple laboratories in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and professional schools of the university. The university progressively recognized this working force with the recent creation of the Office for Postdoctoral Affairs and the Yale Postdoctoral Association.
Notable alumni
Over its history, Yale has produced many distinguished alumni in a variety of fields, ranging from the public to private sector. Around 71% of undergraduates join the workforce, while the next largest majority of 16.6% go on to attend graduate or professional schools. Yale graduates have been recipients of Rhodes Scholarships, Marshall Scholarships, Truman Scholarships, Churchill Scholarships, and Mitchell Scholarships. The university is also a large producer of Fulbright Scholars, and has produced many MacArthur Fellows. The U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs ranked Yale highly among research institutions producing the most Fulbright Scholars.
At Yale, one of the most popular undergraduate majors among Juniors and Seniors is political science, with many students going on to serve careers in government and politics. Former presidents who attended Yale for undergrad include William Howard Taft, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush while former presidents Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton attended Yale Law School. Former vice-president and influential antebellum era politician John C. Calhoun also graduated from Yale. Former world leaders include Italian prime minister Mario Monti, Turkish prime minister Tansu Çiller, Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, German president Karl Carstens, Philippine president José Paciano Laurel, Latvian president Valdis Zatlers, Taiwanese premier Jiang Yi-huah, and Malawian president Peter Mutharika, among others. Prominent royals who graduated are Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden, and Olympia Bonaparte, Princess Napoléon.
Yale alumni have had considerable presence in U.S. government in all three branches. On the U.S. Supreme Court, a number of justices have been Yale alumni, including Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh. Numerous Yale alumni have been U.S. Senators, including current Senators Michael Bennet, Richard Blumenthal, Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown, Chris Coons, Amy Klobuchar, Ben Sasse, and Sheldon Whitehouse. Current and former cabinet members include Secretaries of State John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Cyrus Vance, and Dean Acheson; U.S. Secretaries of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott, Robert Rubin, Nicholas F. Brady, Steven Mnuchin, and Janet Yellen; U.S. Attorneys General Nicholas Katzenbach, John Ashcroft, and Edward H. Levi; and many others. Peace Corps founder and American diplomat Sargent Shriver and public official and urban planner Robert Moses are Yale alumni.
Yale has produced numerous award-winning authors and influential writers, like Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Sinclair Lewis and Pulitzer Prize winners Stephen Vincent Benét, Thornton Wilder, Doug Wright, and David McCullough. Academy Award winning actors, actresses, and directors include Jodie Foster, Paul Newman, Meryl Streep, Elia Kazan, George Roy Hill, Lupita Nyong’o, Oliver Stone, and Frances McDormand. Alumni from Yale have also made notable contributions to both music and the arts. Leading American composer from the 20th century Charles Ives, Broadway composer Cole Porter, Grammy award winner David Lang, and award-winning jazz pianist and composer Vijay Iyer all hail from Yale. Hugo Boss Prize winner Matthew Barney, famed American sculptor Richard Serra, President Barack Obama presidential portrait painter Kehinde Wiley, MacArthur Fellow and contemporary artist Sarah Sze, Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Garry Trudeau, and National Medal of Arts photorealist painter Chuck Close all graduated from Yale. Additional alumni include architect and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Maya Lin, Pritzker Prize winner Norman Foster, and Gateway Arch designer Eero Saarinen. Journalists and pundits include Dick Cavett, Chris Cuomo, Anderson Cooper, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Fareed Zakaria.
In business, Yale has had numerous alumni and former students go on to become founders of influential business, like William Boeing (Boeing, United Airlines), Briton Hadden and Henry Luce (Time Magazine), Stephen A. Schwarzman (Blackstone Group), Frederick W. Smith (FedEx), Juan Trippe (Pan Am), Harold Stanley (Morgan Stanley), Bing Gordon (Electronic Arts), and Ben Silbermann (Pinterest). Other business people from Yale include former chairman and CEO of Sears Holdings Edward Lampert, former Time Warner president Jeffrey Bewkes, former PepsiCo chairperson and CEO Indra Nooyi, sports agent Donald Dell, and investor/philanthropist Sir John Templeton,
Yale alumni distinguished in academia include literary critic and historian Henry Louis Gates, economists Irving Fischer, Mahbub ul Haq, and Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman; Nobel Prize in Physics laureates Ernest Lawrence and Murray Gell-Mann; Fields Medalist John G. Thompson; Human Genome Project leader and National Institutes of Health director Francis S. Collins; brain surgery pioneer Harvey Cushing; pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper; influential mathematician and chemist Josiah Willard Gibbs; National Women’s Hall of Fame inductee and biochemist Florence B. Seibert; Turing Award recipient Ron Rivest; inventors Samuel F.B. Morse and Eli Whitney; Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate John B. Goodenough; lexicographer Noah Webster; and theologians Jonathan Edwards and Reinhold Niebuhr.
In the sporting arena, Yale alumni include baseball players Ron Darling and Craig Breslow and baseball executives Theo Epstein and George Weiss; football players Calvin Hill, Gary Fenick, Amos Alonzo Stagg, and “the Father of American Football” Walter Camp; ice hockey players Chris Higgins and Olympian Helen Resor; Olympic figure skaters Sarah Hughes and Nathan Chen; nine-time U.S. Squash men’s champion Julian Illingworth; Olympic swimmer Don Schollander; Olympic rowers Josh West and Rusty Wailes; Olympic sailor Stuart McNay; Olympic runner Frank Shorter; and others.