MechE Seminar Series: Jake Welde

Speaker:Jake Welde

Title:Geometric Abstractions for Efficient and Explainable Control of Complex Aerial Robots

Abstract:Aerial robots have the potential to move dynamically through unsafe, cluttered, or hard-to-reach environments to perform vital tasks that humans cannot. However, to achieve the morphological complexity necessary for physical interaction, today’s aerial robots sacrifice dynamic behavior. On the contrary, complex organisms like hummingbirds demonstrate incredible dexterity and agility simultaneously. To realize even a fraction of these capabilities, I believe we must jointly explore the combined control-morphology design space. In particular, I argue that differential geometry offers a remarkably effective toolkit for developing efficient control algorithms for robotic systems. By leveraging the natural symmetry and structure of the underlying mechanics, we enable efficient planning of dynamically feasible trajectories for underactuated systems and accelerate reinforcement learning for trajectory tracking control. Such control insights also guide design, closing the control-morphology feedback loop and leading to synergies between a robot’s embodiment and its controller. By combining explainable abstractions with scalable computation, I build towards a future in which aerial robots interact with their surroundings as dynamically and capably as their counterparts in Nature.

About the Speaker:Jake Welde is a PhD candidate in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics at the University of Pennsylvania, working in the GRASP Laboratory with Vijay Kumar. He has been recognized with the NSF GRFP ‘19 and as an RSS Pioneer ‘24, and his interdisciplinary work earned a Best Paper Award at NeurReps ‘24 and a Best Paper Finalist mention at ICRA ‘21. His departmental contributions have been recognized with the Outstanding TA Award and the John A. Goff Prize for scholarship, resourcefulness, and leadership.