Dr. Nancy Pollard

Biography

Nancy Pollard is a Professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of Computational Neuroscience and Robotics. She focuses on understanding physical interactions within environments to inform the development of dexterous robots capable of operating in human-centric settings. Pollard emphasizes creating natural grasping and manipulation behaviors in robots by utilizing human examples as resources. Her initial experiments demonstrated that humanoid robots could effectively navigate large, heavy objects using strategies derived from human observation. Furthermore, she explores the significance of physical correctness in computer graphics, developing fast techniques to compute optimal and physically plausible motion. Pollard's work extends to modeling convincing hand motions in robotics and graphics, where she studies the complexities of human hand anatomy to better control animated and robotic hands. Through her research, she addresses questions related to how robots can mimic human task performance and how to develop robust control policies based on collected human movement examples.

Research Interests

Courses