Dartmouth Events

Abstract: This presentation focuses on using simulation to design the brain and the body of extraterrestrial robots operating on or interacting with the deformable terrain and engaged in operations such as off-roading, bulldozing, excavating, etc. The holy grail is to synthesize the robot and its autonomy stack entirely in simulation, and then successfully deploy the robot in the real world. Even when things don’t work out quite as hoped for, simulation can reduce both costs and time-to-market and can also be used to automatically generate ground-truth labels for training AI solutions, thereby creating smarter robots. To achieve this, one must simulate various elements: the robot's dynamics, the sensors it employs, the environment in which it operates, the actuation process, and the coordination of perception, path planning, and controls within the autonomy stack. This talk will report on our lab’s activities in this area, and touch on the challenges that make it difficult for a digital twin to match the behavior of its real-world counterpart. The presentation will draw on work carried out in our lab in conjunction with several NASA lunar projects related to VIPER, RASSOR, Moon Ranger, and a lunar terrain vehicle.

Bio:Dan Negrut received his Mechanical Engineering Ph.D. in 1998 from the University of Iowa. He spent six years working as a software developer in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In 2004 he served as an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He spent 2005 as a Visiting Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division. At the end of 2005 Dan joined the Mechanical Engineering faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His interests are in Computational Science, and he co-leads the Simulation-Based Engineering Lab (http://sbel.wisc.edu). Lab sponsors include National Science Foundation, NASA, US Army Research Office, Department of Transportation, Department of Energy, and several industry partners such as Hexagon, Komatsu, and Wind River. The lab’s projects focus on simulation-in-robotics, terramechanics, high performance computing, computational dynamics, fluid-solid interaction, computer vision, computer graphics. Dan received a National Science Foundation Career Award in 2009. Since 2010 he has been an NVIDIA CUDA Fellow. He is one of the technical leads of Project Chrono, an open-source multi-physics simulation platform (http://www.projectchrono.org/). Chrono is used in real-life projects such as NASA’s VIPER design and the Artemis mission.