Robotic leg prostheses and exoskeletons can provide powered locomotor assistance to older adults and/or persons with physical disabilities. However, one of the grand challenges in human-robot locomotion is control - i.e., how should the robot walk? In this talk, Dr. Laschowski will present his latest research on robotic leg control, ranging from autonomous control using computer vision and/or reinforcement learning to neural control using brain-machine interfaces. One of the long-term goals of his research is to conduct the first experiments to study, along this spectrum of autonomy, what level of control do individual users prefer, which remains one of the major unsolved research questions in the field. To accomplish this and other ambiguous goals, his lab focuses on four main technical areas related to human-robot interaction and locomotion, including 1) modelling and design optimization of robotic actuators, 2) computer vision for perception and environment-adaptive control, 3) neural interfaces for human-centered control, and 4) reinforcement learning and optimal control of humans and/or robotic systems in physics-based simulation. In addition to robotic legs for assistance and rehabilitation, his research has implications for humanoid robots.

Dr. Brokoslaw Laschowski is a Research Scientist and Principal Investigator with the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics in Rehabilitation Team at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, Canada’s largest rehabilitation hospital, and an Assistant Professor (status) in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto. He also works as a Core Faculty Member in the University of Toronto Robotics Institute, where he founded and directs the Bionics Lab. He previously worked at the Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital. He completed his postdoctoral fellowship in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto. Prior to that, he received his PhD and master’s degrees from the Department of Systems Design Engineering and the Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering, respectively, both at the University of Waterloo. He completed a second master’s degree in the School of Kinesiology (neuroscience) at the University of Western Ontario. His fields of expertise include computer vision, robotics, computational neuroscience, deep learning, and brain-machine interfaces.

The overall vision of his research lab is to improve health and performance by merging humans with robotics and artificial intelligence. As a result of his innovative designs and research, he has published in many leading scientific journals, including the Frontiers in Neurorobotics, the IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics, and the Frontiers in Robotics and AI. He has given invited talks at top international conferences such as the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) and has been awarded competitive and external funding (e.g., from the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada). His award-winning research has been featured on media networks like BBC, CBC, Forbes, and Maclean’s magazine. Most notably, he was recently invited to showcase his research to the President of South Korea and was featured in a keynote by the founder and CEO of NVIDIA. In terms of service, he was the co-founder and director the summer research program in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto for student refugees from Ukraine, funded by the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence.