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Plenary Speakers |
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 Plenary Speaker 1 |
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Dr. Roland Menassa Biography
Manufacturing Systems Research Lab
General Motors, USA
www.gm.com
"Robonaut2 and Next Generation Industrial Robots"
General Motors and NASA have partnered under a cooperative agreement to develop a robotic assistant that can work in harmony with humans. Robonaut2 (R2) is designed to work safely in close proximity to humans while assisting with useful |
| tasks. By increasing the level of collaborative human-robot interaction in a manufacturing capacity, both exposure to ergonomically challenging tasks and product quality can be improved. This session will describe the NASA/GM partnership, the development of the R2 system, as well as discuss concepts that envision the future role that service robots could have in a new class of industrial applications. |
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| Plenary Speaker 2 |
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Prof. Michel Maharbiz Biography
University of California at Berkeley
USA
www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~maharbiz
"Cyborg Beetles: building interfaces between the synthetic
and the multicellular"
In this talk, I will discuss recent developments in my lab's ongoing exploration of the remote control of insects in free flight via implantable radio-equipped miniature |
| neural stimulating systems. I will discuss the original flight control results as well as recent results in building interfaces to the sensory organs of pupating insects, the generation of power from implanted fuel cells and extreme miniaturization. Our original system consisted of a pronotum-mounted radio transceiver-equipped microcontroller, a microbattery and neural and muscular stimulators. Flight initiation, cessation and elevation control were accomplished through neural stimulus of the brain which elicited, suppressed or modulated wing oscillation. Turns were triggered through the direct muscular stimulus of either of the basalar muscles. We characterized the response times, success rates, and free-flight trajectories elicited by our neural control systems in remotely-controlled beetles. |
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| Plenary Speaker 3 |
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Prof. Kenzo NONAMI Biography
Chiba University
Japan
http://mec2.tm.chiba-u.jp/~nonami/
“R & D of Fully Autonomous Air,
Ground and Surface Vehicles and their cooperation”
UAVs, MAVs, UGVs and ASVs are called Uvs (unmanned vehicles) nowadays.
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| In recent decades, the development of unmanned autonomous vehicles have been of great interest, and different kinds of autonomous vehicles have been studied and developed all over the world. In particular, UAVs have many applications in emergency situations; humans often cannot come close to a dangerous natural disaster such as an earthquake, a flood, an active volcano, or a nuclear disaster. Since the development of the first UAVs, research efforts have been focused on military applications. Recently, however, demand has arisen for UAVs such as aero-robots and flying robots that can be used in emergency situations and in industrial applications. Among the wide variety of UAVs that have been developed, small-scale HUAVs (helicopter-based UAVs) have the ability to take off and land vertically as well as the ability to cruise in flight, but their most important capability is hovering. Hovering at a point enables us to make more effective observations of a target. Furthermore, small-scale HUAVs offer the advantages of low cost and easy operation. And UGVs and ASVs have been a quite useful for TEPCO Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster. This presentation will be introduced such activities by using UGVs and ASVs. |
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| Plenary Speaker 4 |
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Prof. Michael Beetz Biography
Technische Universität München
Germany
http://ias.cs.tum.edu
“Robotic Agents Performing Human-Scale Everyday Manipulation Tasks
- In the Knowledge Lies the Power”
Enabling robotic service agents to perform natural language instructions such as
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"flip the pancake" or "push the spatula under the pancake" requires us to equip robots with large amounts of knowledge. To perform such tasks adequately, robots must, for instance, be able to infer the appropriate tool to use, how to grasp it and how to operate it. They must, in particular, not push the whole spatula under the pancake, i.e. they must not interpret instructions literally but rather recover the intended meaning.
Recently, we have seen impressive examples of information systems that have scaled towards open problem-solving tasks formulated in naturalistic ways by leveraging vast sources of information, e.g. the Siri personal assistant on the iPhone and the Watson system, which outperformed the human champions in the popular US quiz show "Jeopardy!".
In this talk, I will present some of our ongoing research in which we transfer these ideas to autonomous robotics in order to realize knowledge-intensive robot control programs that use the world-wide web as a comprehensive source of knowledge. |
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| Plenary Speaker 5 |
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Dr. Mun Sang Kim Biography
Director of Center for Intelligent Robotics, KIST
Korea
www.irobotics.re.kr
“Intelligent Robot Software Framework for Real Robotic Service to Human”
In recent years service robots have received a lot of attention from both industry |
| and academia. They are individually designed to perform tasks in an unstructured environment for working with or assisting humans. Such robots thus have to be able to actively interact with potential users in their surroundings and to appropriately offer their services. It is essential for service robots to have a very flexible and well organized software framework in order to handle this kind of enormous and diverse information flow. In this presentation an unique intelligent robot architecture is introduced, which has been successfully applied to an intelligent robot called ‘Silbot’. Some video clips through the real experimental tryout will be also given during the presentation. |
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