Research Interests

I am interested in providing robots with the resourcefulness to autonomously operate in unstructured environments. Such resourcefulness of a robotic platform is determined by many aspects of robotics ranging from the mechanical structure over the electrical and embedded systems to control, planning, and learning. All these aspects are tightly interleaved and are required for a competent robot.

In my dissertation, I followed a holistic approach that includes hardware and software aspects of the design. I developed physical and control capabilities of a robot for performing the same tasks in different ways. Combined with a planner the robot is capable of adapting to variations in the environment or the task. Partial observability and uncertain action outcomes are handled by planning in belief-space. Novel representations enable the belief-space planner to remain tractable for online planning without losing expressiveness.

My work includes significant amounts of hardware and software design of the dynamically stable mobile manipulators uBot-4, uBot-5, uBot-6, and uBot-7 with the aim to create a resourceful platform which is able to exhibit dexterity in both mobility and manipulation.

Patents

• Magnetic Spherical Balancing Robot Drive (US Patent),
  L. Smoot, D. Ruiken, Disney Research, September 2012.

Publications

• uBot-7: A Dynamically Balancing Mobile Manipulator with Series Elastic Actuators,
  D. Ruiken, JP. Cummings, UR. Savaria, FC. Sup IV, and R. Grupen, 16th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, Birmingham, UK, November, 2017. [pdf]
• Balancing Detail and Abstraction in Belief-Space Planning for Robotics,
  D. Ruiken and R. Grupen, Workshop on POMDPs in Robotics: State of The Art, Challenges, and Opportunities, Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), Boston, MA, July, 2017. [pdf]
• Belief-Space Planning for Resourceful Manipulation and Mobility,
  D. Ruiken, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst, May, 2017. [pdf]
• Reconfigurable Tasks in Belief-Space Planning,
  D. Ruiken, T. Liu, T. Takahashi, and R. Grupen, 16th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, Cancun, Mexico, November, 2016. [pdf]
• Affordance-Based Active Belief: Recognition using Visual and Manual Actions,
  D. Ruiken, JM. Wong, T. Liu, M. Hebert, T. Takahashi, M. Lanighan, and R. Grupen, International Conference on Robotics and Systems (IROS), Daejeon, Korea, October, 2016. [pdf]
• Log-Space Harmonic Function Path Planning,
  K. Wray, D. Ruiken, R. Grupen, and S. Zilberstein, International Conference on Robotics and Systems (IROS), Daejeon, Korea, October, 2016. [pdf]
• Reconfigurable Tasks in Belief-Space Planning,
  D. Ruiken, T. Liu, T. Takahashi, and R. Grupen, Workshop on Integrating Multiple Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Techniques in Robotics (MIRROR-16) at IROS 2016, Daejeon, Korea, October, 2016. [pdf]
• A Compact, Modular Series Elastic Actuator,
  JP. Cummings, D. Ruiken, EL. Wilkinson, MW. Lanighan, RA. Grupen, FC. Sup IV, ASME Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics, 2016. [pdf]
• Error Detection and Surprise in Stochastic Robot Actions,
  Li Yang Ku, D. Ruiken, E. Learned-Miller, and R. Grupen, 2015 IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, Seoul, South Korea, November 2015. [pdf]
• Path Planning for Dexterous Mobility,
  D. Ruiken, M. Lanighan, and R. Grupen, 24th International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, Portsmouth, USA, November 2014. [pdf]
• Postural Modes and Control for Dexterous Mobile Manipulation: the UMass uBot Concept,
  D. Ruiken, M. Lanighan, and R. Grupen, 13th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, Atlanta, USA, October 2013. Best Paper Award Finalist. [pdf]
• Cost Sensitive Whole-Body Mobility (Poster),
  D. Ruiken, M. Lanighan, and R. Grupen, New England Manipulation Symposium, Cambridge, USA, May 2013.
• Choosing Informative Actions for Manipulation Tasks, S. Sen, G. Sherrick,
  D. Ruiken, and R. Grupen, 11th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, Bled, Slovenia, October 2011. [pdf]
• Hierarchical Skills and Skill-based Representation,
  S. Sen, G. Sherrick, D. Ruiken, and R. Grupen, Workshop on Lifelong Learning from Sensorimotor Experience, Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), San Francisco, CA, August, 2011. [pdf]
• Schema Structured Bayesian Inference for Manipulation and Grasping,
  G. Sherrick, S. Sen, D. Ruiken, and R. Grupen, New England Manipulation Symposium (NEMS). Yale University, May, 2011.
• Peer-to-Peer Training - Hierarchical Training Methods for Multi-Agent Emergency Response (Poster),
  D. Xie, Y. Lin, D. Ruiken, S. Sen, H. Jung, S. Ou, R. Grupen, New England Manipulation Symposium (NEMS). Yale University, May, 2010
• Dexterous Mobility with the uBot-5 Mobile Manipulator,
  S. Kuindersma, E. Hannigan, D. Ruiken, and R. Grupen, 14th International Conference on Advanced Robotics (ICAR), Munich, Germany. June, 2009. [pdf]
• Design and Optimization of a Parallel Kinematic Neck Driving Mechanism,
  D. Ruiken, Diploma Thesis, Department of Computer Science & Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany. June 2007. [pdf]