Robotics at the University of Pennsylvania from Birth to Maturity: A Review of 30 Years of Research

Dr. Ruzena Bajcsy
Emeritus Prof. of CIS at University of Pennsylvania & NEC Distinguished Emeritus Prof. of EECS at UC Berkeley

Salazar Hall 2009A
4:00 PM - 4:50 PM

Abstract: In this talk, I will reexamine the evolution of robotics research at the University of Pennsylvania, covering the successes and struggles of PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty between 1972 and 2000. In 1972, I came to Penn’s newly formed Department of Computer and Information Science from Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory full of energy, enthusiasm, and the goal of establishing a similar lab at Penn. This talk demonstrates the creativity and ingenuity of young professionals at the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing, and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory. We collaborated with psychologists and engineers to build a community of roboticists. Our curiosity led us to build new vision and tactile systems and to investigate cooperative ground and air robotics systems. We used computational models supported and verified by experiments. Today, I am proud to say that almost all the students who cycled through the GRASP Lab are successful in academia or industry.

Bio: Ruzena Bajcsy received her Master’s (1957) and Ph.D. (1967) degrees in electrical engineering from Slovak Technical University, and her Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University in 1972. She is a Professor Emeritus of Computer and Information Science (CIS) at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) and Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and NEC chair holder at the University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley), and Director Emeritus of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Science (CITRIS). In 1979, she founded Penn’s General Robotics, Automation, Sensing & Perception (GRASP) Laboratory. In 1999, she was appointed to the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation. In 2001, she joined the faculty at Berkeley. Dr. Bajcsy is a member of the National Academies of Engineering and Science Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2008), and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), IEEE, and the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. She is the recipient of the ACM/Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Allen Newell Award (2001), the Benjamin Franklin Medal for Computer and Cognitive Sciences (2009), the IEEE Robotics and Automation Award (2013), the NAE Simon Ramo Founders Award (2016), and the Berkeley Citation (2023). In 2021, Dr. Bajcsy returned to the University of Pennsylvania.