MMAE 593 Seminar: Pranav Bhounsule

The Department of Mechanical, Materials, and Aerospace Engineering presents its MMAE 593 seminar series featuring guest speaker Pranav Bhounsule, associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), who will present “Wheels, Legs, Drones, and Birds: Learning and Control Across Time Scales.” This event is open to the public and will take place on Wednesday, January 21, from 12:45–1:45 p.m. in Room 104 of the Stuart Building.

Abstract

I will present three case studies on autonomous systems operating at different levels of decision making: deciding where to go (vehicle routing), deciding how to coordinate movement (motion control), and deciding how to move through a cluttered environment (motion planning), in that order. (1) Teams of drones and wheeled robots can extend mission durations, with drones surveying geographically dispersed waypoints and landing on wheeled robots for recharging. Coordinating such teams requires solving a combinatorial optimization problem, which is computationally challenging. I will present heuristic and learning-based methods that enable real-time control, including dynamic re-routing, and demonstrate their effectiveness through field experiments. (2) Legged robots are difficult to control due to high degrees of freedom, underactuation, and nonlinear dynamics. I will present reduced-order model-based approaches augmented with experimental data to achieve high-fidelity motion control. These methods are illustrated on monopod, quadruped, and humanoid platforms. (3) Flappy Bird is a simple yet surprisingly challenging game where a player taps the screen to score a point each time the bird passes through a gap between two pipes. Despite its simplicity, achieving even two-digit scores is a very challenging task. I will present both heuristic and model-based control strategies for motion planning and demonstrate approaches that consistently achieve high performance. (Try as many times as you want, but remember your highest score: flappybird.io).

Biography

Pranav Bhounsule is an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), where he has been on the faculty since 2019. Prior to joining UIC, he was an assistant professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, following a postdoctoral appointment at Disney Research. He earned his Ph.D. in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from Cornell University. His robotics research has been primarily supported by the National Science Foundation and the Army Research Office.