M. Ani Hsieh

University of Pennsylvania
Deputy Director, GRASP Lab; Graduate Program Chair, ROBO; Associate Professor, MEAM
Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics

From Data-Driven to Physics Guided: A Pathway to More Efficient, Generalizable, and Robust Autonomy

Robots and autonomous systems revolutionize the way we explore and interact with the world around us!  However, good dynamics modeling is foundational in the design, control, and planning of robust and safe robotic systems.  However, as robotic systems and the environments where they are deployed in become more complex, it is increasingly difficult to capture their behaviors by relying solely on foundational, first-principles, physics models.  In this talk, I will describe my group’s attempts at bridging the gap between physics-based and data-driven methods to improve model performance, increase sample efficiency, and enhance the generalizability of learned models.  Specifically, I will discuss two approaches to knowledge embedding: through the use of  Knowledge-Based Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (KNODE) and via Koopman operator theory.  I will conclude with example robot applications ranging from tight formation flying with quadrotors to mapping complex spatiotemporal processes to highlight the advantages of physics-informed learning.

M. Ani Hsieh is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics at the University of Pennsylvania.  She is also the Deputy Director of the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing, and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory and Program Chair for the Robotics MSE Program.  Her research interests lie at the intersection of robotics, multi-agent systems, and dynamical systems theory.  Hsieh and her team design algorithms for estimation, control, and planning for multi-agent robotic systems with applications in environmental monitoring, estimation and prediction of complex dynamics, and design of collective behaviors.  She received her B.S. in Engineering and B.A. in Economics from Swarthmore College and her PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.  Prior to Penn, she was an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics at Drexel University.  Hsieh is the recipient of a 2012 Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Award and a 2013 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award.