NU Engineering PhD student awarded ‘Best Student Paper’

Congratulations to Northeastern University Engineering PhD student Kyle Lockwood on being awarded the Best Student Paper at a competitive engineering conference this year.

Lockwood’s paper, titled “Leveraging Submovements for Prediction and Trajectory Planning for Human-Robot Handover” won Best Student Paper at the 15th ACM International Conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments (PETRA).

Lockwood was co-advised by Bouvé’s Gene Tunik and the College of Engineering’s Dr. Deniz Erdogmus.

We asked Lockwood to summarize the paper. He told us, “Humans are highly predictive when completing handovers with other humans, which allows these interactions to happen seamlessly. In this paper, we develop models for handover prediction and trajectory planning that leverage a well-described feature of human movement: Gaussian-shaped submovements in velocity profiles, to act as robotic surrogates for human inference and trajectory planning in a handover task.”

The project is related to an NSF grant that was awarded to Tunik, Erdogmus, Dr. Taskin Padir of COE, and Dr. Mat Yarossi of Bouvé.