2025-2026 Seminar Series
Upcoming Seminar
Speaker: Yan Gu (Purdue University)
Title: Prediction & Reaction in Motion: Humanoid Control for Non-Inertial Worlds and Athletic AI
Abstract: Humanoids must predict and react in unpredictable, fast-changing environments. This talk presents a unified perspective on whole-body control across two complementary fronts: dynamic locomotion and manipulation when the support surface accelerates, and athletic behavior in table tennis that compresses perception-action cycles to sub-second horizons. These fronts define an emerging research frontier in acceleration-aware, time-critical control that prioritizes anticipation, coordination, and reliable execution.
In non-inertial settings such as moving ships, airplanes, and trains, platform accelerations act as unknown, time-varying disturbances that invalidate common assumptions in modeling, state estimation, planning, and control. I will describe my group's recent advances in both model-based and learning-based approaches that enable robust locomotion on accelerating terrains. These results target high-impact applications such as shipboard operations and public-transit interventions, where reliable function requires reasoning in accelerating frames.
As a complementary stress test, athletic humanoid table tennis exposes limits in the timing and precision of existing perception and decision-making approaches. I will present an end-to-end reinforcement learning framework that maps ball observations and robot proprioception directly to coherent arm swing and footwork, relaxes common hitting-plane constraints, and achieves rapid, accurate returns with versatile two-dimensional footwork in simulation and in zero-shot hardware deployment. This work is part of an ongoing collaboration with Prof. Karthik Ramani at Purdue University.
I will close by synthesizing lessons across both regimes, emphasizing prediction under tight time constraints and reaction through coordinated whole-body motion, and by outlining open problems for generalizable humanoid control in highly dynamic real-world contexts.
Date: Wednesday, March 25th, 2026
Time: 9:00-10:00 AM EDT
Link: https://dartmouth.zoom.us/j/94765993258?pwd=aErnkjFBqQaOTEgonxZkeNTbojHRbp.1
Line-Up and Video Links
| Date | Speaker | Title | YouTube |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dec. 11, 2025 | Heng Yang | Semidefinite Relaxations for Robot Perception and Control: From Theory to Practice and Back | (link) |
| Jan. 15, 2026 | Anirudha Majumdar | Video World Models That Know When They Don't Know | (link) |
| Feb. 19, 2026 | Thomas Lew | Uncertainty-Aware Control at the Limits | |
| March 25, 2026 | Yan Gu | Prediction & Reaction in Motion: Humanoid Control for Non-Inertial Worlds and Athletic AI | |
| April 9, 2026 | Somil Bansal | Topic coming soon |