ShanghAI Lectures 2012: Lecture 9 “Ontogenetic development”

In the 9th part of the ShanghAI Lecture series, we look at ontogenetic development as Rolf Pfeifer talks about the path from locomotion to cognition. This is followed by two guest lectures: The first one by Ning Lan (Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China) on cortico-muscular communication in the nervous system, the second by Roland Siegwart (ETH Zurich) on the design and navigation of robots with various moving abilities.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence run by Rolf Pfeifer and organized by me and partners around the world.

Ning Lan: Cortico-Muscular Communication of Movement Information by Central Regulation of Spindle Sensitivity

Ning Lan is Professor at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China. He tells us about cortico-muscular communication in the nervous system.

Roland Siegwart: Design and Navigation of Wheeled, Running, Swimming and Flying Robots

Roland Siegwart is professor at ETH Zurich and the director of the Autonomous Systems Laboratory.

Robots are rapidly evolving from factory work-horses, which are physically bound to their work-cells, to increasingly complex machines capable of performing challenging tasks as search and rescuing, surveillance and inspections, planetary exploration or autonomous transportation of goods. This requires robots to operate in unstructured and unpredictable environments and various terrains. This talk will focus on design and navigation aspects of wheeled, legged, swimming and aerial robots operating in complex environments.

Siegwart presents wheeled inspection robots designed to crawl into machines and take various measurement, quadruped walkers that exploit natural dynamics and serial elastic actuation, swimming robots and autonomous micro-helicopters used to inspect cluttered, GPS denied cities or narrow indoor environments. He also presents a small fixed-wing airplane capable of staying in the air indefinitely due to its solar powered generator.

Related links:

• Slides (17.4 MB)
• ShanghAI Lectures website
• Book: How the Body Shapes the Way We Think

Nathan Labhart Co-organizing the ShanghAI Lectures since 2009.

Nathan Labhart Co-organizing the ShanghAI Lectures since 2009.