Chad Jenkins is our latest faculty recipient of an NSF CAREER award, a highly selective grant that the National Science Foundation awards to junior faculty members who are likely to become academic leaders of the future.

The project funded by Chad’s CAREER grant aims to enable autonomous robots to learn decision making policies from multivalued demonstrations. Activities to be performed include:

* Creating standardized, accessible, and reproducible robot platforms (such as the $700 Brown SmURV platform);

* Developing transferable undergraduate autonomous robotics courses that build on the “control loop” as a unifying concept (similar to the “rendering pipeline” in graphics); and ...