Northeast Robotics Colloquium Held at UMass Amherst
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On Saturday, September 28, the 2024 Northeast Robotics Colloquium (NERC) was held at UMass Amherst in the Student Union Ballroom and welcomed 225 attendees representing nearly 30 universities and companies. The goal of NERC is to serve as a research meeting, networking event, job fair, and showcase for the robotics community across the Northeastern United States and Canada.
UMass Amherst hosted the 2024 Northeast Robotics Colloquium (NERC), led by faculty and students from the College of Engineering and the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences. Professors Frank Sup, Meghan Huber, Gina Olson, Hao Zhang, and Donghyun Kim, representing both colleges, organized this year’s event. Hosting NERC allowed UMass Amherst to strengthen connections with the broader robotics community and demonstrate its growing leadership in robotics research and education.
NERC featured keynote presentations, poster sessions, and short podium talks highlighting the region's latest cutting-edge robotics research. The featured keynote addresses from three distinguished speakers: Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee of Cornell University, Tesca Fitzgerald from Yale University, and Donghyun Kim of UMass Amherst.
Kim, an assistant professor at the Manning College of Information & Computer Sciences (CICS) and the leader of the Dynamic and Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARoS) Laboratory presented on “Advancing Legged Robots: Human Study to Innovation.” Specifically, Kim discussed his work on developing a robotic guide dog to serve the visually impaired and developing a humanoid robot based on HyperLeg’s toe and ankle mechanism.
Professor Tesca Fitzgerald presented “Getting Robots to Ask Better Questions.” As Fitzgerald explains, “As robots become more commonplace in human environments, they will need to adapt to novel task variations that they have not been trained to address. I develop algorithms that allow a robot to structure and interpret its interactions with a human teacher in order to adapt its task knowledge to novel situations. By enabling a robot to ask for help in addressing unfamiliar problems, my work contributes toward a future of adaptive, collaborative robots.”
Professor Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee presented “Towards Robotics Caregiving: Building Robots that Work Alongside Human Stakeholders.” Bhattacharjee’s research aims to enable robots to assist people with mobility limitations in performing their activities of daily living. This spans research in human-robot interaction, haptic perception, and robot manipulation.
Beyond the keynotes, the colloquium featured two poster sessions presenting 101 posters and 13 short podium talks selected from the poster submissions, highlighting a diverse set of robotics research topics. These sessions provided a platform for researchers to showcase their work and foster connections.
The event concluded with the announcement that Cornell University will host NERC in 2025, continuing the tradition of fostering collaboration and innovation within the regional robotics community.
This story was originally published by the UMass Amherst College of Engineering.
