MIT Robotics Seminar: Matthew Gombolay

"Towards Human-Robot Teaming in Sports: The Experimental Sport Tennis wHEelchair Robot (ESTHER)"

Athletics are a quintessential and universal expression of humanity. From French monks who in the 12th century invented jeu de paume, the precursor to modern lawn tennis, back to the K’iche’ people who played the Maya Ballgame as a form of religious expression over three thousand years ago, humans have sought to train their minds and bodies to excel in sporting contests. Advances in robotics are opening up the possibility of robots in sports. Yet, key challenges remain, as most prior works in robotics for sports are limited to pristine sensing environments, do not require significant force generation, or are on miniaturized scales unsuited for joint human-robot play. In this talk, I will first present the first opensource, full stack, autonomous robot for playing regulation wheelchair tennis. Second, I will present our recent developments in enabling improvements for robotic perception, decision-making, and control, leveraging the latest in generative AI, such as diffusion models, and novel approaches for integrating deep learning and symbolic optimization techniques. Third, I will lay out a roadmap towards our ultimate vision: human-robot mixed doubles in competitive play. Achieving this vision can advance robotics writ large for everyday life.

Dr. Matthew Gombolay is an Associate Professor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He was named the Anne and Alan Taetle Early-career Assistant Professor in 2018. He received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 2011, an S.M. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT in 2013, and a Ph.D. in Autonomous Systems from MIT in 2017. Between defending his dissertation and joining the faculty at Georgia Tech, Dr. Gombolay served as technical staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, transitioning his research to the U.S. Navy and earning an R&D 100 Award. His publication record includes best paper awards and nominations from the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics, the ACM/IEEE Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, the Conference on Robot Learning, and Robotics: Science and Systems. Dr. Gombolay was selected as a DARPA Riser and received the Early Career Award from the National Fire Control Symposium, a NASA Early Career Fellowship, and the NSF CAREER award.

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