The scientist is looking at the error message of the giant robot’s operating system.

In this video lecture Carme Torras, Research Professor at the Spanish Scientific Research Council (CSIC) looks at the process of working on assistive robots employed as helpers to disabled or elderly people, shopping helpers, cleaning aids, even co-workers in workshops and factories. Her research in the Perception and Manipulation group focuses on enhancing the perception, learning, and planning capabilities of robots in human environments.

Torras features several key issues in her lecture: safety in home environments, capability to manipulate with deformable objects (for example, clothes), tolerance to inaccurate actions, goal-directed executions, and capability to actively collaborate with humans. One of the main challenges of developing assistive robots are system adaptations for ‘non-experts’ to program the robots.

The final part of her lecture tackles the debate concerning assistive robotics, asking: what are the ethical and social implications for having robots in people’s lives . How will human nature change with increasing H-R interaction? Her answer leads into science fiction and current depictions between robots and humans in popular culture.

Credits: Institut de Robòtica
Informàtica Industrial, CSIC-UPC

Carme Torras is Research Professor at the Spanish Scientific Research Council (CSIC). She received M.Sc. degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from the Universitat de Barcelona and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, respectively, and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC). Prof. Torras has published five books and about two hundred papers in the areas of robot kinematics, computer vision, geometric reasoning, machine learning and manipulation planning. She has been local project leader of several European projects in the frontier between AI and Robotics, among which the FP6 IP project “Perception, Action and COgnition through Learning of Object-Action Complexes” (PACO-PLUS), and the FP7 STREP projects “GARdeNIng with a Cognitive System” (GARNICS) and “Intelligent observation and execution of Actions and manipulations” (IntellAct).

She was awarded the Narcís Monturiol Medal of the Generalitat de Catalunya in 2000, and she became ECCAI Fellow in 2007, member of Academia Europaea in 2010, and member of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Barcelona in 2013. Prof. Torras was IEEE RAS Associate Vice-President for Publication Activities (2012-13) and she is currently Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

Torras C. IJARS Video Series: Robotic Assistants: Science meets Fiction [online video]. International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, 2016, 13:V1. DOI: 10.5772/62467

The IJARS team sat down at ICRA with two influential academics in robotics: Professor Howie Choset (Carnegie Mellon University) and Professor Seth Hutchinson (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) to discuss some of the latest developments in robotics, what students of robotics should be focusing on, and what research they most hope to be remembered for.

A bit tongue-in-cheek, but if you ever wondered what engineering minds like to do in their free time there is a humorous Seth & Howie tradition not to be missed! Seth also shares his insight on what makes a science publication truly relevant.

We invite you to watch our interview with the Fantastic Robotics Duo. Enjoy!

Credits: ECE Illinois and Carnegie Mellon

Seth Hutchinson is a faculty member at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, where he is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Coordinated Science Laboratory, and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. He received his Bachelors, Masters, and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University. He has published more than 200 papers on the topics of his research interests: vision-based control of robotic manipulators, robot motion planning, and computer vision.

Howie Choset is a Professor of Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. Motivated by applications in confined spaces, Choset has created a comprehensive program in snake robots, which has led to basic research in mechanism design, path planning, motion planning, and estimation. Choset directs the Undergraduate Robotics Minor at Carnegie Mellon and teaches an overview course on Robotics which uses series of custom developed Lego Labs to complement the course work. In 2002 the MIT Technology Review elected Choset as one of its top 100 innovators in the world under 35. Choset also co-founded a company called Medrobotics (formerly Cardiorobotics) which makes a small surgical snake robot for minimally invasive surgery.

Choset H, Hutchinson S. IJARS Video Series: Howie Choset and Seth Hutchinson interview with the International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems [online video]. International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, 2015, 12:V10. DOI: 10.5772/62191

In this video lecture, IEEE Fellow Raja Chatila shares his views on why roboticists are duty-bound to educate the wider public on the state of advanced robotics , and also to understand the consequences of their own research and the potential commercialisation of it. 

Looking a specific examples of robots that have either already been or will soon be commercialized — including drones, UGVs in defence and security, robotic devices for rehabilitation and human augmentation, robot companions, robot personal assistants robots, sexual robots, and autonomous cars — Chatila explores the ethical, legal and societal issues of autonomous robot decisions, accountability, privacy and intrusion, dependance and isolation, cognitive and affective bonds, and the status of the robot in human society.

Credits: Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique

IEEE Fellow Raja Chatila is Director of Research at the French National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS) and Director of the Institute of Intelligent Systems and Robotics (ISIR) at Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris.

His research covers robot navigation and SLAM, motion planning and control, cognitive and control architectures, human-robot interaction, and robot learning. He works on robotics projects in the areas of service, field, aerial and space robotics. He is author of over 140 international publications on these topics.

Chatila R. IJARS Video Series: On the Ethics of Research in Robotics [online video]. International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, 2015, 12:V9. DOI: 10.5772/61995

In this short video lecture, Ayanna M. Howard, Motorola Foundation Professor and Associate Director of Research at the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines (Georgia Institute of Technology), introduces us to the world of healthcare robotics for therapy purposes.

Howard focuses on how to provide highly functional robotics that can be used safely both at home and at the hospital to assist a variety of individuals in terms of age, disabilities, and specific treatments. She also highlights the benefits, characteristics and current developments of robotic systems employed in assisting individuals to improve their movement coordination or function, for example in children with CP who not only need therapy assistance but also a play component to motivate and engage.

To find out more about the challenges of robots in therapy, play therapy implementation and robot monitoring/manipulation of the environment, check out this latest lecture.

Source: Georgia Institute
of Technology

Ayanna Howard received her B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Brown University, her M.S.E.E. from the University of Southern California, and her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles in 1999. Her area of research is centered around the concept of humanized intelligence, the process of embedding human cognitive capability into the control path of autonomous systems. This work, which addresses issues of autonomous control as well as aspects of interaction with humans and the surrounding environment, has resulted in over 100 peer-reviewed publications in a number of projects from scientific rover navigation in glacier environments to assistive robots for the home. To date, her unique accomplishments have been documented in over 12 featured articles – including being named as one of the world’s top young innovators of 2003 by the prestigious MIT Technology Review journal and in TIME magazine’s “Rise of the Machines” article in 2004.

From 1993-2005, Howard was at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, where she led research efforts on various robotic projects utilizing vision, fuzzy logic, and neural network methodologies. In 2005, she joined the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech, where she is a member of the systems and controls technical interest group and the founder of the Human-Automation Systems (HumAnS) Laboratory. Howard is also a member of the Center for Robotics and Intelligent Machines at Georgia Tech and currently serves as the robotics Ph.D. program coordinator.

Howard A.M. IJARS Video Series: Healthcare Robotics for Therapy [online video]. International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, 2015, 12:V8. DOI: 10.5772/61754

Kragic underlines the importance of good organisation when it comes to promoting interdisciplinarity among scientific fields, and incentives to attract students in taking up robotics, and shares her views on why robotics is so often negatively portrayed in the media. Finally, will robots be as intelligent as humans? Watch the latest IJARS video to find out.

Danica Kragic is a Professor at the School of Computer Science and Communication at the Royal Institute of Technology, KTH. She received her MSc in Mechanical Engineering from the Technical University of Rijeka, Croatia, in 1995 and PhD in Computer Science from KTH in 2001. She has been a visiting researcher at Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University and INRIA Rennes. She is the Director of the Centre for Autonomous Systems. Danica received the 2007 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Academic Career Award. She is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and Young Academy of Sweden. She holds a Honorary Doctorate from the Lappeenranta University of Technology. She chaired IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Computer and Robot Vision and served as an IEEE RAS AdCom member. Her research is in the area of robotics, computer vision and machine learning. In 2012, she received an ERC Starting Grant. Her research is supported by the EU, Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research and Swedish Research Council.

Kragic D. IJARS Video Series: Danica Kragic Interview with the International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems [online video]. International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, 2015, 12:V7. DOI: 10.5772/61490

RoDyMan will be an innovative mobile platform with a torso, two lightweight arms and a sensorized head that will execute complex manipulation movements similar to the ones humans carry out on a daily basis. The tasks will be carried out in the presence of humans, hence requiring human-robot cooperation.

Siciliano and his team are working an a very specific goal for this project and the inspiration came from their home city of Naples: a platform for performing all the phases of making a pizza. They plan to present this application by May 2018, and to find out more why this date was chosen, we invite you to watch Siciliano’s video lecture in its entirety.

Download the full presentation here. 

Bruno Siciliano is a Professor of Control and Robotics, and Director of the PRISMA Lab in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at the University of Naples. His research interests include: identification and adaptive control, impedance and force control, visual tracking and servoing, redundant and cooperative manipulators, lightweight flexible arms, aerial robots, human-centered and service robotics.

He has co-authored 11 books, 70 journal papers, 200 conference papers and book chapters; his book Robotics: Modelling, Planning and Control is one of the most widely adopted textbooks worldwide. He has delivered more than 100 invited lectures and seminars at institutions worldwide.

Siciliano B. IJARS Video Series:  Human Motion Mapping to a Robot Arm with Redundancy Resolution – The RoDyMan Project [online video]. International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, 2015, 12:V5. DOI: 10.5772/61194

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See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Aerial manipulation is generally defined as the grasping, transporting, positioning, and assembly or disassembly of mechanical parts, measurement instruments, and objects, performed by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with a gripper or robotic arm.

Aerial robotics has become a new frontier in the service industry and is equally useful in rescue, patrolling and localisation operations that seriously put at risk human lives. It’s also proved to be an attractive business opportunity, famously captured by Amazon’s plans for drones to deliver online ordered packages. There are, in fact, numerous industrial applications for drones in inspection and manipulation.

Siciliano and his team at PRISMA have been researching this area for the past seven years and, in this lecture, he focuses on their AIRobots, ARCAS and SHERPA projects, funded by the EU:

• AIRobot (2010-2013) – impedance control techniques for aerial manipulation.
• ARCAS – in its second of four years of planned development and validation of the first cooperative free-flying robot system for assembly and construction
• SHERPA – in its first year of developing a mixed ground and aerial robotic platform to support search and rescue activities in a real-world hostile environments, such as alpine rescue.

Download the full presentation here.

Bruno Siciliano is a Professor of Control and Robotics, and Director of the PRISMA Lab in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at the University of Naples. His research interests include: identification and adaptive control, impedance and force control, visual tracking and servoing, redundant and cooperative manipulators, lightweight flexible arms, aerial robots, human-centered and service robotics.

He has co-authored 11 books, 70 journal papers and 200 conference papers and chapters. His book, Robotics: Modelling, Planning and Control, is one of the most widely adopted textbooks worldwide. He has delivered more than 100 lectures and seminars.

Siciliano B. IJARS Video Series: Aerial Manipulation [online video]. International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, 2015, 12:V4. DOI: 10.5772/60874

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See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

In this video lecture, Massimiliano Zecca from the Healthcare Technology and Head of the Healthcare Technology group at Loughborough University discusses emotional robotics, musical robotics and wearable bio-instrumentation. He centers his research on robotic systems and technologies that assist those in need due to advanced age or illness.

Zecca is interested in robotic systems and human interactions on an emotional level and in designing a mental model for the humanoid robot. This lead to the development of the WE-4RII robot. His second interest and research focus lies in musical robotics and making robots capable of interacting with other musicians, as if the robots were band members. This is how the Waseda flutist robot N.4 refined VI was born, followed by the Waseda saxophonist. His work also touches on how people perceive the interaction with these robots, rather than concentrating solely on advancing the technology. This brought his attention to wearable sensors for humans, where the data collected is directly fed to robots for interpretation.

Zecca explores issues such as how people feel about interacting with the robot on an emotional level, how the robots interact within groups, and how can they “sense” what humans feel during the interaction.

Download the PDF presentation here. 

Massimiliano Zecca holds a Ph.D. in Biomedical Robotics from the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa, (Italy), and currently teaches Healthcare Technology at Loughborough University (UK), where he also leads the Wearable BioRobotics research group.

He is a member of the National Centre for Sport and Exercise Medicine in the East Midlands, and of the NIHR Leicester-Loughborough Diet, Lifestyle and Physical Activity Biomedical Research Unit.

Zecca M. IJARS Video Series: Human-Robot Emotional and Musical Interactions [online video]. International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, 2015, 12:V3. DOI: 10.5772/60801

In this video lecture, Franceso Nori from the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) walks us through the progress that’s been made in humanoid robots in recent years. For example, the humanoids at the DARPA Robotics Challenge disaster scenarios will be required to open several doors to access the disaster scene, but because they are not especially fast and have motor control limitations, they won’t be able do it as efficiently as a real-world situation would require.

To tackle these limitations, Nori focuses on finding ways to advance the dynamic system of a robot – the forces that interact and make the system move. Key to developing dynamic movements in a robot is control, accompanied by the way the robot interacts with the environment. Nori talks us through the latest developments, designs and formulas for floating-base/constrained mechanical systems, whole-body motion control of humanoid systems, whole-body dynamics computation on the iCub humanoid, and finishes with a video on recent implementations of whole-body motion control on the iCub.

Download the full presentation here.

Francesco Nori received his D.Ing. degree (highest honors) from the University of Padova (Italy), in 2002. He obtained his Ph.D. in Control and Dynamical Systems from the the same university in 2005. In 2007, he joined the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology), contributing significantly to the development of the iCub humanoid robot. His research interests are currently focused on whole-body motion control exploiting multiple (possibly compliant) contacts. With Giorgio Metta and Lorenzo Natale, he is one of the key researchers involved in the iCub development, with specific focus on control and whole-body force regulation. Francesco is currently involved in two FP7-EU projects: CoDyCo as coordinator and Koroibot as principal investigator. In the past he was also an investigator in ITALK, VIACTORS and Robotcub.

Nori F. IJARS Video Series: Complete Force Control in Under-actuated but Constrained Mechanical Systems [online video]. International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, 2015, 12:V2. DOI: 10.5772/60571

If you liked this lecture, you may also be interested in:

• iCub philosophy, history and recent results: Lecture by Giorgio Metta
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In this video lecture Fabio Bonsignorio talks about novel ideas that might just lead to a paradigm change robotics that will allow us to apply robot systems to natural environments, and not just factories where systems are operated and controlled by professionals. He believes that the solution to building robotic systems that can intuitively adapt to uncontrolled environments requires more than just technology; we will also need to figure out how to spend less computing power and rely more on cognitive knowledge extracted from network interaction physical agents.

So how do we do that? Watch Bonsignorio’s presentation to learn more about his novel approach to intelligent systems. (You can download the full .pptx presentation here.)

Fabio Bonsignorio is the founder and CEO of Heron Robots as well as an affiliate professor at the Biorobotics Institute (Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Italy).

For more than twenty years he has worked in the R&D departments of Italian and US companies, such as Elsag- BM in CIM (Computer Integrated Manufacturing), ORSI Automazione, Imation, cooperating with, for example, E&Y and Oracle. He is author and co-author of  more the 100 publications in the areas of robotics, cognition and manufacturing systems.

Prof. Bonsignorio is interested in foundational and epistemological issues in (embodied) cognition and robotics, while chasing viable real world applications. He is a member of IEEE/RAS, AAAI, CLAWAR, and euCognition. He coordinated the EURON Special Interest Group on Good Experimental Methodology and Benchmarking in Robotics, and is now the coordinator of the euRobotics TG on Benchmarking the Competition, as well as co chairing the IEEE RAS TC-Pebras. He is the coordinator of the ShanghaiLectures, www.shanghailectures.org.

Bonsignorio F. IJARS Video Series: New AI and Robotics [online video]. International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, 2015, 12:V1. DOI: 10.5772/60398

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In this lecture, Giorgio Metta describes the history and philosophy behind the iCub project, and presents some recent results.

The iCub project was started 10 years ago within the field of Human Robotics, focused mostly on building models of cognitive behaviours. The goals of the project include understanding how the human brain resolves certain problems just to use this knowledge within robotics and build models that can allow robots to solve autonomously the same problems, hence become highly intelligent systems.

20 years ago neurophysiologists discovered special types of neurons called visuomotor neurons. This discovery triggered a shift in the way robots were programmed to learn and perceive as now, mirroring the function of these neurons, the goal was not only for the robot to perceive the surroundings but also to act upon the new information acquired, to carry out a task, solve a problem, imitate what a person would do when he or she perceives and processes external information.

To translate these goals into practice, first experiments where focused on registering human grasping actions via data gloves and trackers and then these registered actions, translated into images, were used to build a classifier which would aid the robot to predict better what action to carry out when perceiving certain information. Furthermore, neuro studies showing that it is not that important to recognise the object to be grasped it but it’s enough to recognise it’s shape, helped Metta and his team build models that prepared the robot to recognise the shape of an object just before executing an action like grasping it. This made possible for the robot to execute more complex behaviours such as recognise not only the objects to be grasped or pushed, but also to recognise tools which may help the robot to do something with the object in question. In one of the experiments lead by Metta, this was translated into an iCub grasping a tool to bring closer an object placed too far away from the robot, in order for the iCub to grasp it.

Watch Metta’s presentation to find out more about his amazing experiments using the iCub robot and what he’s latest research efforts are all about. (You can download the full .pptx presentation here.)

Giorgio Metta is the Director of the well-known iCub Facility. He is currently on leave of absence from the University of Genoa (Italy) where he used to teach courses on Anthropomorphic Robotics and Intelligent Systems for the Bioengineering curricula. He holds a MSc cum laude (1994), and PhD (2000) in Electronic Engineering from the University of Genoa.

From 2001 to 2002 he was postdoctoral associate at the MIT AI-Lab . He has been assistant Professor at the University of Genoa since 2005 and he works at the Italian Institute of Technology where the iCub Facility is to be found since 2006. He is Professor of Cognitive Robotics at the University of Plymouth (UK) since 2012.

Giorgio Metta’s research activities are in the fields of biologically motivated and humanoid robotics and, in particular, in developing humanoid robots that can adapt and learn from experience. His research efforts have stemmed from collaborations with leading European and international scientists from different disciplines like neuroscience, psychology, computer science and robotics.

Metta has authored approximately 250 publications and has been working as principal investigator and research scientist in about a dozen international as well as national funded projects.

Metta G. IJARS Video Series: iCub Philosophy, Some History & Recent Results [online video]. International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, 2014, 11:V5. DOI: 10.5772/60065

CORAL lab’s research focuses on developing further the CORAL’s CoBot robots, type of robots which are aware of their perceptual, physical, and reasoning limitations and proactively ask for help from humans, for example for object manipulation actions. While Brian Colin focused on robot scheduling before transferring to NASA’s Ames Intelligent Robotics Group, Joydeep Biswas studies how the robots handle changes in a human environment. Both researchers’ general interest is to improve robotic systems’ autonomy and intelligence in the real world. Joydeep also participates in CORAL’s robot soccer project and maintains all lab’s robot hardware. At CORAL, they mainly work with CoBots, soccer playing robots, Baxters and Naos. Among the most challenging tasks they’re facing are obstacle avoidance and the need for a CoBot to rely on and autonomously ask for a human’s help when adapting to the environment. Biswas and Coltin give us their views on how these challenges are being handled and what will probably be the turning point in achieving fully autonomous robots.

Another interesting point made in the interview refers to the current state of robotics research published in today’s robotics publications. According to our interviewees, there’s quite a bit of research overlapping among research groups where researchers seem to rediscover separately over and over again the exact same challenges; from this arises the need to work more on collaborative efforts to limit the time expenditure on solving problems already tackled by other robotic labs. In this view, as underlined by Biswas, publishing more in Open Access should allow a larger audience of robotic professionals as well as anyone interested in working with the latest robotic softwares and hardwares to freely access the latest research published by labs such as CORAL. In addition to that, Biswas forwards the need to make it easier for roboticists to publish code and data (both closed binary and open data) to be shared with a wider audience who could then run it directly on their computers – an avenue to be explored by Open Access publications such as our own International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems.

In the last part of the interview, we asked Coltin and Biswas separately about their personal challenges in pursuing their PhD. degrees and who influenced them the most in their career. You may be surprised with who they name as their favorite roboticists, and what they admire the most in their current adviser, Dr. Veloso. Less surprising is their favorite fictional robot – which we will let you discover for yourself.

Biswas J, Coltin B. IJARS Video Series: Joydeep Biswas and Brian Coltin interview – CORAL research group (Carnegie Mellon University) [online video]. International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, 2014, 11:V4. DOI: 10.5772/59985

If you liked this interview, you may also be interested in:

• Novel robots for gait and arm rehabilitation: Interview with Robert Riener
• Robotics then and now: Interview with Peter Corke

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ARMin neuro-rehabilitation device.

In this pair of video lectures, Robert Riener presents his team’s research efforts in the field of rehabilitation robotics, and describes the vision behind Cybathlon, the competition for robot-assisted parathletes.

Novel robots for gait and arm rehabilitation

Patients who have limited use of their arms or legs due to stroke or spinal chord injury require intensive therapy to help them rehabilitate. This rehabilitation process is long, exhausting and expensive, and requires intensive therapy with specialists. With robotic technology, many of these challenges can be overcome.

Systems such as the Robot-Aided Gait Training enable patients to start intensive therapy right away, and for longer hours. The ARMin neuro-rehabilitation device helps stroke patients regain physical capabilities; research results show that patients subjected to ARMin training heal faster than patients working with therapists alone.

These devices involve intense human-robot cooperation and therefore have been developed according to human-robot interaction best practices. Future research will be focused on improving the effectiveness of robotic rehabilitation devices and their overall use in the medical field.

You can download the .pdf presentation here: Novel Robots for Gait and Arm Rehabilitation.

Riener R. IJARS Video Series: Novel Robots for Gait and Arm Rehabilitation [online video]. International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, 2014, 11:V2. DOI: 10.5772/59833

Cybathlon 2016, The Championship for Robot-Assisted Parathletes

Research labs around the world have been focused on developing novel assistive technologies such as wheelchairs, exoskeletal and mechatronic devices to help patients with spinal chord injuries in their daily life activities. There is still a long way to go before these kinds of devices will enable complete movement for these patients.

That is why Dr. Robert Riener and his team of collaborators are organising a special kind of event – Cybathlon 2016 – similar to the paralympic games. During Cybathlon, participants will compete in six disciplines while using wheelchairs, exoskeletons, brain and muscle stimulation devices, and other technologies.

The goal for researchers is to learn the strengths and the weaknesses of these devices and ultimately make them more effective for patients. The project also aims to promote wider use of robotic technology solutions in the fields of medical treatment where extensive physical therapy and assistance is required.

Riener R. IJARS Video Series: Cybathlon 2016, The Championship for Robot-Assisted Parathletes [online video]. International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, 2014, 11:V3. DOI: 10.5772/59837

Robert Riener is Full Professor for Sensory-Motor Systems at the Department of Health Sciences and Technology, ETH Zurich. He has been Assistant Professor for Rehabilitation Engineering at ETH Zurich since May 2003. In June 2006 he was promoted to the rank of an Associate Professor and in June 2010 to the rank of a Full Professor. As he holds a Double-Professorship with the University of Zurich, he is also active in the Spinal Cord Injury Center of the Balgrist University Hospital (Medical Faculty of the University of Zurich).

His current research interests involve human motion synthesis, biomechanics, virtual reality, man-machine interaction, and rehabilitation robotics. He has authored and co-authored more than 400 peer-reviewed journal and conference articles and 20 patents. He is a member of several scientific societies (e.g., IEEE/EMBS, DGBMT/VDE, IFESS) and an associate editor of several scientific journals. For his development of the arm therapy robot ARMin, he was awarded with several prizes including the humanTech Innovation Prize and the Swiss Technology Award. He was awarded also with the IEEE TNSRE Best Paper Award 2010 and the euRobotics Technology Transfer Awards 2011 and 2012.

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He gives us a detailed overview on his latest work concerning the application of robotics in agriculture with the aim to increase food production while lowering the costs of farming efforts, the importance of further developing the sub-fields of environmental monitoring and preservation, and the advantages and disadvantages of starting a robotics labs nowadays and using social media to promote internal activities.

Prof. Corke also reveals who inspired him the most in his career (including the likes of Malcolm C. Good, Richard Paul and Rodney Brooks), as well as what fictional robot he grew up watching – we give you a hint in the form of bright red claws tagged Class M-3 Model B9.

Peter Corke lives in Brisbane with his wife and a cat. By day he’s a professor at Queensland University of Technology. By night he maintains two open-source toolboxes, one for robotics and one for vision. His interests include robotics, computer vision, embedded systems, control and networking. He worked on robotic systems for mining, aerial and underwater applications. You can learn more about his work and what he wanted to be when he grew up in this interview.

Corke P. IJARS Video Series: Peter Corke Interview with the International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems [online video]. International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, 2014, 11:V1. DOI: 10.5772/59497

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