Patrick Deegan

uBot-5: Two-Hand Tripod Postural Mode

B.S. Engineering, 1997, Harvey Mudd College. Claremont, CA
M.S. Computer Science, 2006, University of Massachusetts Amherst

I'm a Ph.D. candidate in the UMASS Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics.

Research Projects

• The Balancing uBot, uBot Series: uBot-0.5 uBot-1 uBot-2 uBot-3 uBot-4 uBot-5
• Robot Learning, Control, and Skill Acquisition
• Distributed Control in Multi-Robot Systems

Interests

Bimanual mobile manipulation tasks require whole-body control to create interaction forces while preserving postural stability. Thus, a human being will lean into a heavy object to push it. Moreover, the marriage of mobility and manipulation affords the ability to create momentum in powerful, massive structures and to transform it into kinetic energy in smaller limbs and grasped objects. My research explores the representations and control for engaging dexterity in mobility and manipulation. I plan to show that dynamically stable robots have new opportunities to control the impedance of manual interactions as well. A series of robots have been constructed to this end - the UMASS uBot series:

uBot-0.5

uBot-1

uBot-2

uBot-3

uBot-4

uBot-5

The uBot-5 platform was designed to provide a research platform for exploring the stability of dynamic interactions and sensorimotor activity for acquiring behavior in human scale environments.

Publications

• Deegan, P. Grupen, R., Hanson, A., Horrell, E., Ou, S., Riseman, E., Sen, S., Thibodeau, B., Williams, A., Xie, D. Mobile Manipulators for Assisted Living in Residential Settings, Autonomous Robots, Special Issue, 2007 (in print)
• Deegan, P., Thibodeau, B., Grupen, R. Designing a Self-Stabilizing Robot For Dynamic Mobile Manipulation, Robotics: Science and Systems - Workshop on Manipulation for Human Environments. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. August, 2006.
• Thibodeau, B., Deegan, P., Grupen, R. Static Analysis of Contact Forces With a Mobile Manipulator, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. Orlando, Florida. May, 2006.
• Rosenstein, Michael, Robert Platt, Patrick Deegan, John Sweeney, Oliver Brock, Andrew Fagg, and Roderic Grupen. Haptic Coupling of Dexterous Manipulation and Dynamic Mobility. In Video Proceedings of the IEEE-RAS/RSJ International Conference on Humanoid Robots, Los Angeles, USA, November 2004. ( Humanoids04.avi, Mobile Manipulation.avi)
• Araujo, E., Karuppiah, D., Yang, Y., Grupen, R., Deegan, P., Lerner, B., Riseman, E., Zhu, Z., Software Mode Changes for Continuous Motion Tracking, International Workshop on Self Adaptive Software, Oxford, England, April, 2000.