BARC talk by Dan Halperin 2026

Monday, May 18, 2026, Dan Halperin, Professor at the Tel Aviv University, Israel, will be giving at talk on "Do We Still Need Robot Algorithms?". 

Abstract:
People increasingly ask, "Do we still need robot algorithms?", or sometimes more specifically, "Do we still need motion planning algorithms?" With recent rapid technological advances, there's a sense that many longstanding robotics problems are already solved, or soon will be. In this talk, I revisit that perception by highlighting important robotics problems that remain far from resolved. I will focus on two areas: (i) optimizing the motion of fleets of robots, where efficient coordination can be not just economically valuable but potentially life-saving, and (ii) automatic robotic assembly planning, which poses deep algorithmic challenges and has significant economic and societal implications. As time permits, I will briefly discuss the ongoing debate within the robotics community on the question, "will data solve robotics and automation?"

Bio:
Dan (Danny) Halperin is an Israeli computer scientist known for his work on computational geometry and robotics. He is currently a Full Professor in the School of Computer Science at Tel Aviv University, and the CTO of Assembrix, a startup company in industrial 3D printing. Halperin was named as an IEEE Fellow in 2015, "for contributions to robust geometric algorithms for robotics and automation", and is a distinguished lecturer of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. He was named as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2018, "for contributions to robust geometric computing and applications to robotics and automation".

Host:
Mikkel Vind Abrahamsen