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CATEGORIES:Conferences/Seminars/Lectures
DESCRIPTION:Plenary Talk:  Robust Robot Behavior Through Online Optimizatio
 n\n\nSpeaker:  Prof. Preston Culbertson\, Cornell University\n\nDate:  Frid
 ay\, January 30\, 2026\n\nAbstract: Much recent progress in robotics has be
 en driven by learned policies trained offline in simulation or from large d
 atasets\, enabling impressive demonstrations in locomotion and manipulation
 . Despite this success\, a key challenge remains: robots must operate in th
 e “long tail” of environments\, where objectives\, dynamics\, and constrain
 ts differ from those seen in training\, often causing fixed policies to bre
 ak down. In this talk\, online optimization serves as a unifying approach f
 or robust robot behavior: actions are adapted at runtime by solving optimiz
 ation problems whose costs and constraints are specified at execution time\
 , with learning used to provide models\, priors\, or uncertainty estimates 
 that make this adaptation tractable. I will present real-world examples fro
 m humanoid locomotion\, whole-body manipulation\, and in-hand dexterous man
 ipulation that demonstrate reliable\, risk-sensitive behavior in contact-ri
 ch and difficult-to-model environments.\n\nBio: Preston Culbertson is an As
 sistant Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. Prior to joini
 ng Cornell\, he was a research scientist at the Robotics and AI Institute a
 nd a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology. He rec
 eived his PhD and MS from Stanford University and his BS from the Georgia I
 nstitute of Technology\, all in mechanical engineering. His research draws 
 on optimization\, control theory\, and machine learning to develop robotic 
 systems that remain reliable when models\, sensing\, or hardware are imperf
 ect.
DTEND:20260130T170000Z
DTSTAMP:20260311T165029Z
DTSTART:20260130T153000Z
GEO:42.361613;-71.092293
LOCATION:Building 45 (MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing)\, 230
SEQUENCE:0
SUMMARY:Plenary Talk | Prof. Preston Culbertson
UID:tag:localist.com\,2008:EventInstance_51826856882686
URL:https://calendar.mit.edu/event/plenary-talk-prof-preston-culbertson
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