Faculty Recruiting Support CICS

Roderic A. Grupen

emeritus
Position: 
Professor Emeritus
Office: 
A337 LGRC
Phone: 
(413) 545-3280

Interests

Autonomous sensorimotor systems, developmental robotics, robot learning, mobile manipulation, dexterous mobility and manipulation, robot hands, tactile sensing, cognitive robotics, embedded control signal interpretation

Research

Professor Grupen conducts research on embodied intelligent systems by integrating mechanisms, control theory, machine learning, and cognitive processing. His laboratory builds dexterous machines that develop in a manner inspired by infant human development and that write their own programs and knowledge structures. Grupen and his students are currently working on personal robots for health care applications, robots designed to explore other planets, robots that learn how to work along side humans, and field robotics systems. His approach relies on structuring the search for behavior by expressing the intrinsic dynamics of physical processes and acquiring policies for robot control tasks using on-line reinforcement learning. The Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics uses this framework as the basis for a computational model of sensorimotor development in humans and machines.

Research Centers & Labs: 

Biography

Ph.D. Computer Science, University of Utah (1988); M.S. Mechanical Engineering, Pennsylvania State University (1984); B.A. Physics, Franklin and Marshall College (1980); B.S. Mechanical Engineering, Washington University (1980). Professor Grupen joined UMass Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences faculty in 1988.

Activities & Awards

Professor Grupen is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Robotics and Autonomous Systems Journal, serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing (AI EDAM), has served as a member of the Editorial Board for the Autonomous Robots Journal Special Issue on Learning in Autonomous Robots (ARJ-LAR), and is a member several Technical Committees and Program Committees. Professor Grupen received the Outstanding Teaching Award of the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, University of Massachusetts Amherst.