Faculty Directory
Brenna Argall

Professor of Computer Science

Professor of Mechanical Engineering

Professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation

Contact

2145 Sheridan Road
Tech Room B288
Evanston, IL 60208-3109

847-467-0862Email Brenna Argall

Website

Brenna Argall's Homepage

Assistive & Rehabilitation Robotics Laboratory (argallab)

Departments

Computer Science

Mechanical Engineering

Affiliations

Master of Science in Robotics Program

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Education

Ph.D. in Robotics, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

M.S. in Robotics, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

B.S. in Mathematical Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA


Research Interests

As need increases, access decreases. Often the more severe a person's motor impairment, the less able they are to operate the very machines created to assist them. My lab endows assistive machines with customized robotics autonomy and intelligence to address this confound. Robots already synthetically sense, act in, and reason about the world, and these technologies can be leveraged to help bridge the gap left by sensory, motor, or cognitive impairments in the users of assistive machines.


A fundamental question that arises time and again throughout many of our projects is how exactly to share control between the robot and the human user, and how to adapt these control formulations over time as the human changes. We are working with a range of hardware platforms, from a smart wheelchair to assistive robotic arms.


By offloading control burden, we aim to increase access, ability, and independence—to advance human autonomy through robotics autonomy.


Selected Publications

  • Gopinath, Deepak E.; Thompson, Andrew; Argall, Brenna D., Information Theoretic Intent Disambiguation via Contextual Nudges for Assistive Shared Control, Springer Nature (2023).
  • Pinosky, Allison; Abraham, Ian; Broad, Alexander; Argall, Brenna; Murphey, Todd D., Hybrid control for combining model-based and model-free reinforcement learning, International Journal of Robotics Research (2023).
  • Abraham, Ian; Broad, Alexander; Pinosky, Allison; Argall, Brenna; Murphey, Todd D., Hybrid Control for Learning Motor Skills, Springer Science and Business Media B.V.:450-466 (2021).
  • Broad, Alexander; Abraham, Ian; Murphey, Todd; Argall, Brenna, Data-driven Koopman operators for model-based shared control of human–machine systems, International Journal of Robotics Research 39(9):1178-1195 (2020).
  • Gopinath, Deepak E.; Argall, Brenna D., Active Intent Disambiguation for Shared Control Robots, IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering 28(6):1497-1506 (2020).
  • Young, Michael; Javaremi, Mahdieh Nejati; Argall, Brenna D., Discrete N-Dimensional Entropy of Behavior, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.:2227-2233 (2019).
  • Javaremi, Mahdieh Nejati; Young, Michael; Argall, Brenna Dee, Interface Operation and Implications for Shared-Control Assistive Robots, IEEE ... International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics : [proceedings] 2019:232-239 (2019).
  • Young, Michael; Miller, Christopher; Bi, Youyi; Chen, Wei; Argall, Brenna Dee, Formalized task characterization for human-robot autonomy allocation, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.:6044-6050 (2019).

Brenna Argall In the News

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