4) Finally, I had distal radioulnar joint instability (hence the extended casting) and learned that hand surgeons and control theorists share one principle: we respect the unstable.

3) Full body manipulation & contact planning: we use our hands and contact forces to navigate the world all the time. Imagine getting in and out of an economy seat on a plane; or jumping over to sit on a table. When your wrist is not as mobile or weak to bear weight, these tasks become quite hard.

2) Jaw joints (think about Boston dynamic spot or any two finger manipulator) are indeed very useful, for instance for providing support for opening packages.

1) Bimanual manipulation is very powerful. While I initially thought not using my left arm/hand won’t be a big deal, I quickly realized for many tasks, we use both hands. Trying to do them with one is hard and even impossible at times.

If I recall it right, they used to support a on-demand print option for each book. Not sure if this is something the author can choose. With a few clicks, I found this: services.publishing.umich.edu/Books/Electr... though it seems some recent ones are offered as ebooks only.

This is mainly for ECE textbooks but we have the following: fet.engin.umich.edu

“Optimizing Data for Decision-Making” by Asu Ozdaglar (MIT)

“Foundation Models for Autonomous Vehicles” by Marco Pavone (Stanford and NVIDIA)

“Some variants of gradient dominance conditions motivated by LQR direct policy optimization” by Eduardo Sontag (Northeastern University)

“Federated Reinforcement Learning: Statistical and Communication Trade-offs” by Yuejie Chi (Carnegie Mellon University)

Time for exciting afternoon tutorials

"Capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Control Engineering" by Bin Hu, Geir Dullerud, Peter Seiler, and Huan Zhang

"The Scenario Approach: Data Science for Decision and Control" by Marco Claudio Campi and Simone Garatti

let's keep having fun (although the ride is a bit bumpy these days)

I am definitely going to the grocery store more often and walking home from there 🙃

No surprise these programs graduated several future Turing Award winners. Congrats to Andrew Barto, the newest among this group.

They had classes in automata theory, AI, info theory, algorithms, optimization, control theory, and even social decision making. It had a perfect Cyber-Physical Systems curriculum before CPS was a thing (well cybernetics was a thing): drive.google.com/file/d/12SEj...