MIT Robotics Seminar | Hadas Kress-Gazit (Cornell University)

Abstract: Anyone who works with robots knows that they will occasionally fail; how they fail varies widely, from harmless hiccups to catastrophic outcomes. In this talk I will argue that we should spend more time defining, evaluating, reporting on, and categorizing failures that matter, and that formal specifications are the right tool for doing so. I will present a tool that facilitates a nuanced evaluation of robot failure in simulation, and discuss a user study in which we saw that people react differently to different failures.

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Hadas Kress-Gazit is the Geoffrey S.M. Hedrick Sr. Professor at the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University, and the Associate Dean for Diversity and Academic Affairs of Cornell’s Duffield College of Engineering. She received her Ph.D. in Electrical and Systems Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 2008 and has been at Cornell since 2009. Her research focuses on formal methods for robotics and automation; her group explores different types of robotic systems including modular robots, soft robots and swarms, and synthesizes ideas from different communities such as robotics, formal methods, control, and learning. She received an NSF CAREER award in 2010, a DARPA Young Faculty Award in 2012, Cornell Engineering’s Excellence in teaching award in 2013 and 2019, and excellence in research award in 2021. She is an IEEE Fellow and has served on DARPA’s Information Science and Technology study group (ISAT), as the program chair for Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2018, the program chair for the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2022, and the president of the RSS board (2019-2023), among other leadership positions in the robotics community.

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