Aaron Edsinger
Post-Doctoral Researcher, MIT CSAIL
Aaron Edsinger is building robots to assist people in everyday tasks within everyday environments. These robots are designed to exploit their physical embodiment, to safely work alongside people, and to benefit from human strategies
for accomplishing tasks. His other interests include the design of interactive, robot companions as well as sculptural
and architectural robot installations.
He is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is working in the Humanoid Robotics Group led by Professor Rodney Brooks. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University and a S.M. from MIT, and a Ph.D. from MIT. He has also recently co-founded the robotics companies HeeHeeHee Labs and Meka Robotics. His work in robotics grew out of the San Francisco robotic art scene in the early 1990's. Since then he has built over a dozen research and artistic robot platforms with long time collaborator Jeff Weber.
His research interests are in developmental and behavior based cognitive architectures for humanoid robots, bimanual robot manipulation, compliant manipulator and hand design, and sensorimotor learning for manipulation. He defended his dissertation "Robot Manipulation in Human Environments" in December 2006. His upper-torso humanoid robot Domo embodies the dissertation's approach to robot manipulation in unstructured environments.
He is the author of Robot Manipulation in Human Environments and A Gestural Language For A Humanoid Robot, and coauthor of Sensing and Manipulating Built-for-Human Environments, Active Vision for Sociable Robots, Social Constraints on Animate Vision, Human-Robot Interaction for Cooperative Manipulation: Handing Objects to One Another, Two Arms are Better than One: Designing Robots that Assist People in Everyday Manual Tasks, Manipulation in Human Environments (winner of the Best paper award at the IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots), and What Can I Control?: The Development of Visual Categories for a Robot's Body and the World that it Influences.
Domo helping with chores