Kavi Dey ’22 Featured in International Robotics Conference

Senior Kavi Dey has been on the Robotics team at Seattle Academy since his freshman year. Both in SAAS and outside of school, Kavi has contributed to some revolutionary ambitions within robotics. His latest project seeks to answer how robots can be used to assist people with disabilities. Kavi’s academic paper on “Cursor-based Robot Tele-manipulation through 2D-to-SE2 Interfaces" was recently accepted into the IEEE IROS 2021 Conference, an international conference on intelligent robots and systems. Kavi co-first-authored the paper as part of an internship he did at the University of Washington with Professor Maya Cakmak and her research team. 

What is Cursor-based Robot Tele-Manipulation?

The team's paper outlines how to build interfaces to control robots that are both highly efficient and accessible to people who have mobility impairments. 

Kavi explains, “We are trying to help people with disabilities, who cannot move some or all of their limbs use robots to interact with the world. For example, they could use robots to feed themselves, play a card game, or turn on a light.”

The team designed 9 different user interfaces to control the PR2 Robot, and ran two online user studies with over 250 participants to evaluate the efficiency and accessibility of each interface. Their goal, as Kavi relays it, was to determine which tools “were the easiest to use for someone with a disability, to help guide the design of future robot control tools.” 

Take a look for yourself! Anyone can test out the interfaces at this link here.  

Spreading the Word

Kavi will present the work at the IEEE IROS 2021 Virtual Conference from September 28-30 — a conference that was originally scheduled to be hosted in Prague. 

Watch the pre-recorded video

More, More Robotics...

This is not Kavi’s first dive into robotics innovation. He has interned at UW with various professors every summer since before 9th grade. During that time, he has authored two other papers, "An Exploration of Accessible Remote Tele-operation for Assistive Mobile Manipulators in the Home" and "Experimental Crowd+AI Approaches to Track AccessibilityFeatures in Sidewalk Intersections Over Time."

Interested in Robotics?

SAAS has a robotics club available to Middle and Upper School students. If interested, check out the robotics page and reach out to robotics leaders.