Roderic Grupen

Roderic Grupen conducts research on embodied intelligent systems by integrating mechanisms, control theory, machine learning, and cognitive processing. His laboratory builds dexterous machines that develop in a manner inspired by infant human development and that write their own programs and knowledge structures. Grupen and his students are currently working on personal robots for health care applications, robots designed to explore other planets, robots that learn how to work alongside humans, and field robotics systems. His approach relies on structuring the search for behavior by expressing the intrinsic dynamics of physical processes and acquiring policies for robot control tasks using online reinforcement learning. The Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics uses this framework as the basis for a computational model of sensorimotor development in humans and machines.

Grupen is the co-editor in chief of the Robotics and Autonomous Systems Journal, serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing (AI EDAM), has served as a member of the editorial board for the Autonomous Robots Journal Special Issue on Learning in Autonomous Robots (ARJ-LAR), and is a member of several technical committees and program committees. He has received an Outstanding Teaching Award from the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at UMass Amherst.