OUSSAMA KHATIB
TITLE OF THE TALK
Ocean One: A robotic avatar for Oceanic discovery
ABSTRACT
The promise of oceanic discovery has intrigued scientists and explorers for centuries, whether to study underwater ecology and climate change, or to uncover natural resources and historic secrets buried deep at archaeological sites. The quest to explore the ocean requires skilled human access. Reaching these depth is imperative since factors such as pollution and deep-sea trawling increasingly
threaten ecology and archaeological sites. These needs demand a system deploying human-level expertise at the depths, and yet remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) are inadequate for the task. A robotic avatar could go where humans cannot, while embodying human intelligence and intentions through immersive interfaces. To meet the challenge of dexterous operation at oceanic depths, in collaboration with KAUST’s Red Sea Research Center and MEKA Robotics, we developed Ocean One, a bimanual force-controlled humanoid robot that brings immediate and intuitive haptic interaction to oceanic environments. Teaming with the French Ministry of Culture’s Underwater Archaeology Research Department, we deployed Ocean One in an expedition in the Mediterranean to Louis XIV’s flagship Lune, lying off the coast of Toulon at ninety-one meters. In the spring of 2016, Ocean One became the first robotic avatar to embody a human’s presence at the seabed. This expedition demonstrated synergistic collaboration between a robot and a human operating over challenging manipulation tasks in an inhospitable environment. Tasks such as coral- reef monitoring, underwater pipeline maintenance, and offshore and marine operations will greatly benefit from such robot capabilities. Ocean One’s journey in the Mediterranean marks a new level of marine exploration: Much as past technological innovations have impacted society, Ocean One’s ability to distance humans physically from dangerous and unreachable work spaces while connecting their skills, intuition, and experience to the task promises to fundamentally alter remote work. We foresee that robotic avatars will search for and acquire materials in hazardous and inhospitable settings, support equipment at remote sites, build infrastructure for monitoring the environment, and perform disaster prevention and recovery operations— be it deep in oceans and mines, at mountain tops, or in space.
SHORT BIO
Oussama Khatib received his PhD from Sup’Aero, Toulouse, France, in 1980. He is Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Robotics Laboratory at Stanford University. His research focuses on methodologies and technologies in human-centered robotics including humanoid control architectures, human motion synthesis, interactive dynamic simulation, haptics, and human-friendly robot design. He is a Fellow of IEEE. He is Co-Editor of the Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics (STAR) series and the Springer Handbook of Robotics, which received the PROSE Award for Excellence in Physical Sciences & Mathematics. Professor Khatib is the President of the International Foundation of Robotics Research (IFRR). He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the IEEE RAS Pioneer Award in Robotics and Automation, the IEEE RAS George Saridis Leadership Award in Robotics and Automation, the IEEE RAS Distinguished Service Award, the Japan Robot Association (JARA) Award in Research and Development, and the IEEE Technical Field Award.
RACHID ALAMI
TITLE OF THE TALK
On decisional abilities for a cognitive and interactive robot
ABSTRACT
This talk addresses some key decisional issues that are necessary for a cognitive robot which shares space and tasks with a human. We adopt a constructive approach based on the identification and the effective implementation of individual and collaborative skills. The system is comprehensive since it aims at dealing with a complete set of abilities articulated so that the robot controller is effectively able to conduct in a flexible manner a human-robot collaborative problem solving and task achievement. These abilities include geometric reasoning and situation assessment based essentially on perspective-taking and affordances, management and exploitation of each agent (human and robot) knowledge in a separate cognitive model, human-aware task planning and interleaved execution of shared plans.
SHORT BIO
Dr. Rachid Alami is Senior Scientist at CNRS. He received an engineer diploma in computer science in 1978 from ENSEEIHT, a Ph.D in Robotics in 1983 from Institut National Polytechnique and an Habilitation HDR in 1996 from Paul Sabatier University He contributed and took important responsibilities in several national, European and international research and/or collaborative projects (EUREKA: FAMOS, AMR and I-ARES projects, ESPRIT: MARTHA, PROMotion, ECLA, IST: COMETS, IST FP6 projects COGNIRON, URUS, PHRIENDS, and FP7 projects CHRIS, SAPHARI, ARCAS, SPENCER France: ARA, VAP-RISP for planetary rovers,
PROMIP, ANR projects). His main research contributions fall in the fields of Robot Decisional and Control Architectures, Task and motion planning, multi-robot cooperation, and human-robot interaction. Rachid Alami is currently the head of the Robotics and InteractionS group at LAAS.
CIRO NATALE
TITLE OF THE TALK
The role of tactile sensing in human-robot interaction
ABSTRACT
Endowing robots with the sense of touch is a challenge tackled by roboticists since many years mostly for manipulation purposes. But tactile sensing can have a major role even in human-robot physical interaction with multiple objectives. First, for contact detection a reaction, so as to enhance safety of the human-robot collaboration. Then, the same tactile skins can be exploited as human-machine interfaces to allow the human operator to intuitively program and operate the robot. The talk will present an overview of existing technologies for tactile sensing with a special focus on those that can cover large areas of the robot body. Some recent results on cross-modal object recognition will be also presented to show how tactile perception data contain enough information to allow a robot touch and recognize previously seen objects that have never been touched before.
SHORT BIO
Ciro Natale received the Laurea degree and the Research Doctorate degree in Electronic Engineering from the University of Naples in 1995 and 2000, respectively. From 2000 to 2004 he has been Research Associate at the Department of Information Engineering of the Second University of Naples, where he currently holds the position of Associate Professor of Automatic Control and Robotics. From November 1998 to April 1999 he was a Visiting Scholar at the German Aerospace Center in Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany.
His research interests include modeling and control of industrial manipulators, force and visual control, cooperative robots, as well as modeling and control of flexible structures, active noise and vibration control and modeling, identification and control of smart actuators. He has published more than 100 journal and conference papers, he is author of the book: "Interaction Control of Robot Manipulators – Six-degrees-of-freedom tasks'' (Springer 2003) and co-author of the book: "Active Control of Flexible Structures'' (springer 2010). He has been an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology from 2009 to 2015 and he currently serves as Associate Editor of Automatica and the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.
He is the local Scientific Responsible of the following FP7 European projects: ECHORD (www.echord.info), SAPHARI (www.spahari.eu), LOCOMACHS (www.lochomacs.eu), EUROC (www.euroc-project.eu).