Yverdon-les-Bains - Switzerland
May 19-22, 2005
1st International Conference on Dextrous Autonomous Robots and Humanoids
+ Thursday, May 19, 2005
How can a robot autonomously decide how to perform a motion task while respecting environment constraints such as obstacle avoidance?
The first part of this talk will sketch the mathematical formulation of the motion planning problem and present a state of the art of the methods developed in the 80's (deterministic approaches) and the 90’s (probabilistic approaches and nonholonomic systems). A special focus will be done on random sampling and random diffusion methods. Such methods are today mature enough to give rise to software packages addressing large classes of problems and applications in Robotics and beyond.
The scope of applications is the purpose of the second part of the talk.
Practical problem illustrations will be given in various domains:
- Mobile Robotics (Hilare and its trailer, transportation of the Airbus A380 components by road)
- Manufacturing (spot welding robot programming)
- CAD/CAM (mechanical part assembly in automotive industry)
- Process Engineering (maintenance operation in nuclear powerplants)
- Bio-Engineering (molecular docking and protein folding)
- Animation and Graphics (human artefact animation)
Jean-Paul Laumond is Directeur de Recherche at LAAS-CNRS (www.laas.fr) in Toulouse, France. He received the M.S. degree in Mathematics, the Ph.D. in Robotics and the Habilitation from the University Paul Sabatier at Toulouse in 1976, 1984 and 1989 respectively. From 1976 to 1983 he was teacher in Mathematics. He joined CNRS in 1985. In Fall 1990 he has been invited senior scientist from Stanford University . He has been a member of the French Comité National de la Recherche Scientifique from 1991 to 1995.
From 1992 to 1995 he has been coordinator of two the European Esprit projects PROMotion (Planning RObot Motion, 1992-1995) and MOLOG (Motion for Logistics, 1999 - 2002), both dedicated to robot motion planning technology. In 2001 and 2002 he created and managed Kineo CAM, a spin-off company from LAAS-CNRS devoted to develop and market motion planning technology (www.kineocam.com). Kineo CAM was awarded the French Research Ministery prize for innovation and enterprise in 2000.
He teaches Robotics at ENSTA and Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris . He has edited three books. He has published more than 100 papers in international journals and conferences in Computer Science, Automatic Control and Robotics.
"About the Necessary Move from Cognitics to Ethics; Additional Definitions and Contributions to Metrics in MCS." J.-D. Dessimoz, EIVD - Hes-so, Switzerland
"Climbing Robot Competition experience at University of Catania"
D. Longo and G. Muscato, DIEES University of Catania, Italy
"Map Recall Based on Hierarchical Associative Memories"
J. Stanclova and D. Obdrzalek, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
"Multilayered Neural Network Adaptive Controller for Robot Manipulators"
B. Amrouche and B. Kazed,
CDER and University of Blida,
Algeria
"Lomu, an Autonomous Mobile Robot with Robust Architecture and Components"
N. Uebelhart, F. Glardon and P.-F. Gauthey, EIVD - Hes-so, Switzerland
"Contribution to the Study of the Synthesis of Biped, Motion with Enhanced Degree of Anthropomorphism"
M. Vukobratovic, B. Borovac and K. Babkovic, Institute Mihajlo Pupin and University of Novi Sad, Serbia and Montenegro
"Using Handheld Computers to Control Humanoid Robots"
S. Behnke, J. Müller and M. Schreiber, University of Freiburg, Germany
"Real-Time Communications in a small biped robot YABIRO" M. Albero, F. Blanes, G. Benet, P. Pérez, J.E. Simo and J. Coronel, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain
"Enabling a Humanoid Robot to Interact with Multiple Persons"
M. Bennewitz, F. Faber, D. Joho, M. Schreiber and S. Behnke, University of Freiburg, Germany
L'exposé comprendra principalement les trois points suivants:
- Rôle respectif de l'homme et des robots dans l'exploration habitée de l'espace
- Exemples relatifs aux programmes de la navette et de la Station Spatiale
- quelques données, y-compris vidéo-clips, sur les opérations robotiques (avec astronautes dans la boucle de contrôle) sur le prochain vol de la navette en juillet 2005
Biographie de Claude Nicollier: www.srv-ch.org/intern/vorstand/nicollier.htm
This public conference (in French) will be held at La Marive; a second session (in english) is scheduled for May 22nd at 13h30.
+ Friday, May 20, 2005
"Precise Tracking Control of Robot Manipulator using Fuzzy Logic"
P. Sumathi, St. Joseph College of Engineering, India
"Establishment of a fuzzy algorithm in a mobile robot for the detection and the avoidance of an obstacle using HC12 Compact interface" B. Bilel, University of Saad Dahleb, Algeria
"Neural Motion Controller for Robots Daisy and Ester"
Z. Winkler, I. Mrázová, J.
Iša and J.
Krchák,
Charles University,
Czech Republic
"Genetic-based path planning method for a robotic manipulator using efficient collision avoidance through several obstacles"
M. Ghayour and M. Karimi, Isfahan Univeristy of Technology and University of Khorasgan, Iran
"Vision-based navigation of a mobile target across rotating 2-D unknown obstacle using a genetic algorithm"
M. Ghayour and M. Karimi, Isfahan Univeristy of Technology and University of Khorasgan, Iran
"New Modular Architecture for the Mobile Robot MORDUC: from the Hardware to the SLAM Algorithm" D. Caltabiano and G. Muscato, University of Catania, Italy
"Design and implementation of an intelligent predictive controller towards vision based application"
R. Koker, S. Firat and M. Khariman, Sakarya University and Fatih Technical High School, Turkey
"Fabrication and Control of a 4-DOF, Autonomous Robotic Arm Using Low Cost AVR Controller"
A. Waqar, N. Hassan, S. Bano and R. Ilyas, College of EME, Pakistan
"Advanced control structure for the autonomous mobile robot LODUR"
P. Maurer and M. Gagnebin, EIVD - Hes-so, Switzerland
"Framework for rovers' navigation and obstacle avoidance"
E. Burattini, P. Coraggio, A. De Santis and B. Siciliano, Università di Napoli Federico II, Italy
(until 15h30)
"Tracking the Absolute Position of a Mobile Robot Using Vision-Based Monte Carlo Localizazion"
J. Benda and Z. Winkler, Charles University,
Czech Republic
"Control of Omni-Directional Mobile Platform with Four Driving Wheels" T. Nakazato, S. von Wyl, H. Osumi and J.-D. Dessimoz, Chuo University, Japan and EIVD - Hes-so, Switzerland
"Modelling and animation of virtual planetary rovers in simulated world for evaluation of locomotion structures" N. Uebelhart, S. Michaud and O. Michel, EIVD - Hes-so, Contraves Space and Cyberbotics, Switzerland,
"Overconstrained Wheeled Vehicles: A Simpler Rocky 7 - The Kinematic Car"
S.N. Gautam and P. Awadhiya, Government Engineering College, India
"Assured recovery of a rollover mobile manipulator by manipulation and passive suspension"
M. Karimi and M. Ghayour, University of Khorasgan and Isfahan University of Technology, Iran
O. Michel, Cyberbotics Ltd, Switzerland (until 21h30)
The Roboka Cyber Robot Tournament is an international humanoid robot wrestling competition held on the Internet.
This competition is open to anybody interested and is free. The goal of this programming contest is to share our passion and knowledge about robot controllers in a competitive and amusing physics-based robot simulation environment. In this way, challenging scientific work is much more enjoyable and can be compared in a fair competition.
With only a basic Java knowledge, anybody can enter the competition. No special robotic skills are necessary to get started. Just register, program your controller and post it to your account. Every day at 14:00 (Central European Time) the competition is started with your actual controller. You can watch the tournament live or download the matches later. The Hall of fame keeps you informed of your actual position in the competition.
Dr. Olivier Michel is the founder and CEO of Cyberbotics Ltd. He received a PhD from Nice University (France) in 1996 and worked as a postdoc researcher in LAMI at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne from which he created Cyberbotics in 1998.
Cyberbotics developed the Aibo robot simulator for Sony and is now developing Webots which has become a reference software in mobile robot prototyping and simulation used by over 200 universities and research centers worldwide.
This public conference (in french) will be held at La Marive; a second session (in english) is scheduled for May 21st at 20h30.
+ Saturday, May 21, 2005
The RoboCup is a scientific challenge used to foster research in the robotics areas. The main and ultimate goal consists in developing a robotic football team able to play against a human team in the year 2050. Meanwhile, several approaches are adopted, compared within different leagues,
The presentation will indicate the rules of such a competition, show several videos from all the RoboCup leagues, discuss the actual state of the art of robotic football players, and describe the main characteristics to take into account in order to build such types of robots. These aspects are described and analysed in terms of further developments.
This public conference will be held at La Marive.
RoboCup is an attempt to foster intelligent robotics research by providing a standard problem of which the ultimate goal is to build a team of eleven humanoid robots that can beat the human world cup champion soccer team by 2050.
In this talk, I show to what extent we have achieved so far in the past RoboCups with video clips and what the future issues are towards the final goal. Industrialization is another main target in RoboCup to make an impact on our daily lives by providing RT (robot technologies) as intelligent artifacts. To do so, we need an open testbeds for RT products to be monitored by as many people. I proposed RoboCity CoRE (Center of Rt Experiments) as such a place in Osaka City.
Cognitive developmental robotics has been proposed as a new way of understanding ourselves and as a new design theory of robotics. Case studies towards emergence of communication are introduced, which are constructive models of mother-infant interaction towards infants' vowel articulation, and of primary joint attention mechanism.
The former is inspired by the observation that infants acquire phonemes common to adults without having the capability to articulate, and without having explicit knowledge about the relationship between the sensorimotor system and phonemes. We experiment with an artificial articulatory system consisting of a 5-DOF mechanical system deforming a silicon-made vocal track, connected to an artificial larynx. The processing unit of the system consists in an extractor of formants and a learning mechanism with self-organizing auditory and articulatory layers. Starting off with random vocalization, the system uses the caregiver's parroting to boostrap its learning. As an illustration of the power of imitation, the system's utterance doesn't necessarily have to be the same as the caregiver's.
The latter argues how a human infant acquires the ability of joint attention through interactions with its caregiver. A constructive model by which a robot learns a sensorimotor coordination for joint attention based on visual attention and self learning is introduced. Because visual attention does not always correspond to joint attention, the robot has incorrect learning situations as well as correct ones. However, the robot is expected to statistically lose the data of the incorrect ones as outliers through the learning, and consequently acquires the ability of joint attention even if the environment is not controlled nor the caregiver provides any task evaluation.
Prof. Minoru Asadareceived the B.E., M.E., and Ph.D., degrees in control engineering from Osaka University, Osaka, Japan, in 1977, 1979, and 1982, respectively. From 1982 to 1988, he was a Research Associate of Control Engineering, Osaka University, Toyonaka, Osaka, Japan. April 1989, he became an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering for Computer-Controlled Machinery, Osaka University, Suita, Osaka, Japan. April 1995 he became a Professor of the same department. Since April 1997, he has been a Professor of the department of Adaptive Machine Systems at the same university. From August 1986 to October 1987, he was a visiting researcher of Center for Automation Research, University of Maryland, College Park, MD.
He has received the 1992 best paper award of IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS92), and the 1996 best paper award of RSJ (Robotics Society of Japan). Also, his paper was one of the ten finalists of IEEE Robotics and Automation Society 1995 Best Conference Paper Award. He was a general chair of IEEE/RSJ 1996 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS96). Since early 1990, he has been involved in RoboCup activities and his team was the first champion team with USC team in the middle size league of the first RoboCup held in conjunction with IJCAI-97, Nagoya, Japan. In 2001, he received the Commendation by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japanese Government as Persons of distinguished services to enlightening people on science and technology. Since 2002, he has been the president of the International RoboCup Federation. IEEE Fellow since 2005.
O. Michel, Cyberbotics Ltd, Switzerland (until 19h00)
The Roboka Cyber Robot Tournament is an international humanoid robot wrestling competition held on the Internet.
This competition is open to anybody interested and is free. The goal of this programming contest is to share our passion and knowledge about robot controllers in a competitive and amusing physics-based robot simulation environment. In this way, challenging scientific work is much more enjoyable and can be compared in a fair competition.
With only a basic Java knowledge, anybody can enter the competition. No special robotic skills are necessary to get started. Just register, program your controller and post it to your account. Every day at 14:00 (Central European Time) the competition is started with your actual controller. You can watch the tournament live or download the matches later. The Hall of fame keeps you informed of your actual position in the competition.
Dr. Olivier Michel is the founder and CEO of Cyberbotics Ltd. He received a PhD from Nice University (France) in 1996 and worked as a postdoc researcher in LAMI at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne from which he created Cyberbotics in 1998.
Cyberbotics developed the Aibo robot simulator for Sony and is now developing Webots which has become a reference software in mobile robot prototyping and simulation used by over 200 universities and research centers worldwide.
This public conference (in english) will be held at La Marive; a second session (in french) is scheduled for May 20th at 20h30.
+ Sunday, May 22, 2005
The lecture will mostly include the following three topics:
- Respective role of humans and robots in the manned exploration of space
- Examples relating to Shuttle and International Space Station programs
- Some data, with video-clips, about robotic operations (with astronauts in control loop) on next shuttle flight, in July 2005
Claude Nicollier biographical data: www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/nicollie.html
This public conference (in English) will be held at La Marive; a second session (in French) is scheduled for May 19th at 20h00.