I always enjoy it when different interests in my life collide. Working on Robot Theatre falls into this category, as do sillier things like Star Wars Night at a Cardinals game.

I came across the following talk by Uri Alon. When I first saw it, two things caught my eye. First, the topic is highly relevant to my academic career at the moment. The second things was that the name was familiar. In fact, most of the work being done at my first lab is based on the book that he wrote. Hence, there’s some fun interest collision there.

However, there’s more connections than that. In the talk, he discusses how improv theatre led him to accept failure as part of the process AND he ends his talk with a song about the emotional impact of parts of academic life. If I had a dollar for every time I wanted to break out into song about the trials and tribulations of grad school…

David V. Lu, Daniel B. Allan, William D. Smart. Tuning Cost Functions for Social Navigation. At ICSR 2013. Bristol, England, October 2013.

[link] – [poster] – [bibtex]

@inproceedings{lu2013costmaps,
  author={Lu, David V. and Allan, Daniel B. and Smart, William D.},
  title={Tuning {C}ost {F}unctions for {S}ocial {N}avigation},
  series = {International Conference on Social Robotics},
  location = {Bristol, England},
  year = {2013}
}

The final publication is available at link.springer.com.

The poster for this work was awarded the runner up for Best Poster at ICSR 2013.

David V. Lu, William D. Smart. Towards More Efficient Navigation for Robots and Humans. At IROS 2013. Tokyo, Japan, November 2013.

[link] – [bibtex] – [presentation pdf]- [presentation ppt]*

@inproceedings{lu2013corridor,
  author = {Lu, David V. and Smart, William D.},
  title = {Towards {M}ore {E}fficient {N}avigation for {R}obots and {H}umans},
  series = {IROS},
  year = {2013},
  location = {Tokyo, Japan}
}

*This paper was presented and the slides were designed by Bill Smart.

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