Kaijen Hsiao

I'm a grad student in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the Learning and Intelligent Systems Group run by Professors Leslie Kaelbling and Tomas Lozano-Perez.

At the moment I'm working on robust manipulation under uncertainty, which means that I want robots to be able to grasp objects and put them down accurately even when they have noisy estimates of where the objects are, or what their hands are feeling, or even the precise details of the shapes of the objects. Normal, precise grasp planning methods often result in failing to grasp or even knocking objects over when the world is noisy. This is something that people often solve using compliant manipulators that just glom over the object, but for some tasks, precise grasps are required (such as grasping handles, using tools, or doing assembly operations). In our case, we model the world as a POMDP (Partially Observable Markov Decision Process), and try various complexities of planning such as solving the full POMDP (when tractable) or, more recently, choosing appropriate fixed, pre-planned trajectories based on the current belief state, which we then try to execute robustly (what doesn't kill you, gives you information. Try try again). I'm also working on using proximity (IR) sensors to do robust reactive grasping.

Here are some abstracts of past work:
Grasping POMDPs
Imitation Learning of Whole-Body Grasps

Here are links to my publications:
"Passive Acoustic Knock Tracking for Interactive Windows," Joseph A. Paradiso, Che King Leo, Nisha Checka, Kaijen Hsiao. ACM CHI2002, Minneapolis, MN.

"Passive Acoustic Sensing for Tracking Knocks Atop Large Interactive Displays," Joseph A. Paradiso, Che King Leo, Nisha Checka, Kaijen Hsiao. IEEE International Conference on Sensors, 2002.

"Evolving Simulated Mutually Perceptive Robots for Combat," Michael O'Kelly and Kaijen Hsiao. ALIFE 2004.

"Imitation Learning of Whole-Body Grasps," Kaijen Hsiao and Tomas Lozano-Perez. IROS, 2006.

"Grasping POMDPs," Kaijen Hsiao and Leslie Pack Kaelbling and Tomas Lozano-Perez. ICRA, 2007.

"Grasping POMDPs: Theory and Experiments," Ross Glashan and Kaijen Hsiao and Leslie Pack Kaelbling and Tomas Lozano-Perez, RSS Manipulation Workshop: Sensing and Adapting to the Real World, 2007.

Here is a presentation on my latest research.
Here are accompanying videos.

Here is my resume.

And here is a page with pictures of some of my crafts.