Through manipulation, a robotic system can physically change the state of the world. This is intertwined with intelligence, which is the ability whereby such system can detect and adapt to change. In his talk, Tamim Asfour gives an overview of the developments in manipulation for robotic systems his lab has done by learning manipulation task models from human observations, and the challenges and open questions associated with this.

Bio: Tamim Asfour is full Professor at the Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics, where he holds the chair of Humanoid Robotics Systems and is head of the High Performance Humanoid Technologies Lab (H2T). His current research interest is high performance 24/7 humanoid robotics. Specifically, his research focuses on engineering humanoid robot systems integrating the mechano-informatics of such systems with the capabilities of predicting, acting and learning from human demonstration and sensorimotor experience. He is developer and the leader of the development team of the ARMAR humanoid robot family.

In this technical talk, Amanda Prorok, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Cambridge University, and a Fellow of Pembroke College, discusses her team’s latest research on what, how and when information needs to be shared among agents that aim to solve cooperative tasks.

Abstract

Effective communication is key to successful multi-agent coordination. Yet it is far from obvious what, how and when information needs to be shared among agents that aim to solve cooperative tasks. In this talk, I discuss our recent work on using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to solve multi-agent coordination problems. In my first case-study, I show how we use GNNs to find a decentralized solution to the multi-agent path finding problem, which is known to be NP-hard. I demonstrate how our policy is able to achieve near-optimal performance, at a fraction of the real-time computational cost. Secondly, I show how GNN-based reinforcement learning can be leveraged to learn inter-agent communication policies. In this case-study, I demonstrate how non-shared optimization objectives can lead to adversarial communication strategies. Finally, I address the challenge of learning robust communication policies, enabling a multi-agent system to maintain high performance in the presence of anonymous non-cooperative agents that communicate faulty, misleading or manipulative information.

Biography

Amanda Prorok is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Technology, at Cambridge University, UK, and a Fellow of Pembroke College. Her mission is to find new ways of coordinating artificially intelligent agents (e.g., robots, vehicles, machines) to achieve common goals in shared physical and virtual spaces. Amanda Prorok has been honored by an ERC Starting Grant, an Amazon Research Award, an EPSRC New Investigator Award, an Isaac Newton Trust Early Career Award, and the Asea Brown Boveri (ABB) Award for the best thesis at EPFL in Computer Science. Further awards include Best Paper at DARS 2018, Finalist for Best Multi-Robot Systems Paper at ICRA 2017, Best Paper at BICT 2015, and MIT Rising Stars 2015. She serves as Associate Editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (R-AL), and Associate Editor for Autonomous Robots (AURO). Prior to joining Cambridge, Amanda Prorok was a postdoctoral researcher at the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. She completed her PhD at EPFL, Switzerland.

Featuring Guest Panelist(s): Stephanie Gil, Joey Durham

The next technical talk will be delivered by Koushil Sreenath from UC Berkeley, and it will take place on April 23 at 3pm EDT. Keep up to date on this website.

Talking Robotics is a series of virtual seminars about Robotics and its interaction with other relevant fields, such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Design Research, Human-Robot Interaction, among others. They aim to promote reflections, dialogues, and a place to network. In this seminars compilation, we bring you 7 talks (and a half?) from current roboticists for your enjoyment.

Filipa Correia “Group Intelligence on Social Robots”

Filipa Correia received a M.Sc. in Computer Science from University of Lisbon, Portugal, 2015. She is currently a junior researcher at GAIPSLab and she is pursuing a Ph.D. on Human-Robot Interaction at University of Lisbon, Portugal.

Her PhD thesis is focused on the challenges of creating social robots that are capable of sustaining cohesive alliances in team settings with humans. Moreover, it contributes with computational mechanisms for the robotic teammate to autonomously express group-based emotions or to gaze human teammates in multi-party settings.

For more information about the speaker and related papers, please see this website.

Ross Mead “Bringing Robots To Life”

Dr. Ross Mead is the Founder and CEO of Semio. Ross received his PhD and MS in Computer Science from the University of Southern California in 2015, and his BS in Computer Science from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in 2007.

In this talk, Dr. Ross Mead discussed the technological advances paving the way for the personal robotics revolution, and the robotics hardware companies leading the charge along that path. He also introduced the software innovations in development at Semio for bringing robots to life.

For more information about the speaker and related papers, please see this website.

Kim Baraka “Humans and Robots Teaching and Learning through Social Interaction”

Kim Baraka is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Socially Intelligent Machines Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. He holds a dual Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University and Instituto Superior Técnico (Portugal), an M.S. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon, and a Bachelor in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the American University of Beirut.

In the first part of the talk, focusing on robots teaching humans, Kim discussed algorithmic solutions that enable socially assistive robots to teach both children and therapists in a personalized way. In the second part of the talk, focusing on humans teaching robots, Kim discussed some preliminary efforts towards developing ways in which robots can learn tasks from human teachers in richer and more natural ways.

For more information about the speaker and related papers, please see this website.

Glenda Hannibal “Trust in HRI: Probing Vulnerability as an Active Precondition”

Glenda has previously worked in the Department of Sociology at the University of Vienna and as an expert for the HUMAINT project at the European Commission. Glenda holds a BA and MA in Philosophy from Aarhus University and is currently a PhD student in the Trust Robots Doctoral College and Human-Computer Interaction group at TU Wien.

In this talk, Glenda presented her research on vulnerability as a precondition of trust in HRI. In the first part, she argued that while the most commonly cited definitions of trust used in HRI recognize vulnerability as an essential element of trust, it is also often considered somewhat problematic too. In the second part of her talk, she presented the results of two empirical studies she has undertaken to explore trust in HRI in relation to vulnerability. Finally, she reflected on few ethical aspects related to this theme to end this talk.

For more information about the speaker and related papers, please see this website.

Carl Mueller “Robot Learning from Demonstration Driven Constrained Skill Learning & Motion Planning”

Carl Mueller is a Ph.D. student of computer science at the University of Colorado – Boulder, advised by Professor Bradley Hayes within the Collaborative Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Laboratory. He graduated from the University of California – Santa Barbara with a degree in Biopsychology and after a circuitous route through the pharmaceutical industry, he ended up in the tech, founding his own company building intelligent chat agents for business analytics.

The major theme of his research is the enablement of human users to communicate additional information to the robot learning system through ‘concept constraints’. Concept Constraints are abstract behavioral restrictions grounded as geometric and kinodynamical planning predicates that prohibit or limit the behavior of the robot resulting in more robust, generalizable, and safe skill execution. In this talk, Carl discussed how conceptual constraints are integrated into existing LfD methods, how unique interfaces can further enhance the communication of such constraints, and how the grounding of these constraints requires constrained motion planning techniques.

For more information about the speaker and related papers, please see this website.

Daniel Rakita “Methods and Applications for Generating Accurate and Feasible Robot-arm Motions in Real-time”

Daniel Rakita is a Ph.D. student of computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison advised by Michael Gleicher and Bilge Mutlu. He received a Bachelors of Music Performance from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music in 2012.

In this talk, he overviewed technical methods they have developed that attempt to achieve feasible, accurate, and time-sensitive robot-arm motions. In particular, he detailed their inverse kinematics solver called RelaxedIK that utilizes both non-linear optimization and machine learning to achieve a smooth, feasible, and accurate end-effector to joint-space mapping on-the-fly. He highlighted numerous ways they have applied their technical methods to real-world-inspired problems, such as mapping human-arm-motion to robot-arm-motion in real-time to afford effective shared-control interfaces and automatically moving a camera-in-hand robot in a remote setting to optimize a viewpoint for a teleoperator.

For more information about the speaker and related papers, please see this website.

Barbara Bruno “Culture-Aware Robotics”

Barbara Bruno is a post-doc researcher at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), in Lausanne, Switzerland, in the CHILI lab. Barbara received the M.Sc. and the Ph.D. in Robotics from the University of Genoa in 2011 and 2015, respectively. She is part of the NCCR Robotics organisation and currently involved in the EU ITN ANIMATAS.

In this talk, she explored how existing quantitative and qualitative methods for the assessment of culture, and cultural differences, can be combined with knowledge representation and reasoning tools such as ontologies and fuzzy controllers to endow robots with the capability of taking cultural factors into account in a range of tasks going from low-level motion planning to high-level dialogue management and user adaptation.

For more information about the speaker and related papers, please see this website.

Extra: When you forget to hit the record button but you value the speaker so much that you compose a musical summary of his talk…

Because as they say, we are human after all!

Nils Hagberg “A call for a Human Approach to Technology”

Nils Hagberg is the Product Owner at Furhat Robotics. He is a computer linguist with almost ten years of industry experience in human-machine interaction and conversational technology.

In this talk, he gave a few examples of human-centric business case designs that he’s come across earlier in his career and at Furhat Robotics – the social robotics company that have set out to make technology more human. His hope for this talk is that it will put your own work in a larger context and nudge you towards a path that will ensure humans will be allowed to remain human.

For more information about the speaker and related papers, please see this website.

In this technical talk, Chad Jenkins from the University of Michigan posed the following question: “who will pay the cost for the likely mistakes and potential misuse of AI systems?” As he states, “we are increasingly seeing how AI is having a pervasing impact on our lives, both for good and for bad. So, how do we ensure equal opportunity in science and technology?”

Abstract

It would be great to talk about the many compelling ideas, innovations, and new questions emerging in robotics research. I am fascinated by the ongoing NeRF Explosion, prospects for declarative robot programming by demonstration, and potential for a reemergence of probabilistic generative inference. However, there is a larger issue facing our intellectual enterprise: who will pay the cost for the likely mistakes and potential misuse of AI systems? My nation is poised to invest billions of dollars to remain the leader in artificial intelligence as well as quantum computing. This investment is critically needed to reinvigorate the science that will shape our future. In order to get the most from this investment, we have to create an environment that will produce innovations that are not just technical advancements but will also benefit and uplift everybody in our society. We are increasingly seeing how AI is having a pervasing impact on our lives, both for good and for bad. So, how do we ensure equal opportunity in science and technology? It starts with how we invest in scientific research. Currently, when we make investments, we only think about technological advancement. Equal opportunity is a non-priority and, at best, a secondary consideration. The fix is simple really — and something we can do almost immediately: we must start enforcing existing civil rights statutes for how government funds are distributed in support of scientific advancement. This will mostly affect universities, as the springwell that generates the intellectual foundation and workforce for other organizations that are leading the way in artificial intelligence.This talk will explore the causes of systemic inequality in AI, the impact of this inequity within the field of AI and across society today, and offer thoughts for the next wave of AI inference systems for robotics that could provide introspectability and accountability. Ideas explored build upon the BlackInComputing.org open letter and “Before we put $100 billion into AI…” opinion. Equal opportunity for anyone requires equal opportunity for everyone.

Biography

Odest Chadwicke Jenkins, Ph.D., is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and Associate Director of the Robotics Institute at the University of Michigan. Prof. Jenkins earned his B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics at Alma College (1996), M.S. in Computer Science at Georgia Tech (1998), and Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Southern California (2003). He previously served on the faculty of Brown University in Computer Science (2004-15). His research addresses problems in interactive robotics and human-robot interaction, primarily focused on mobile manipulation, robot perception, and robot learning from demonstration. Prof. Jenkins has been recognized as a Sloan Research Fellow and is a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). His work has also been supported by Young Investigator awards from the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Prof. Jenkins is currently serving as Editor-in-Chief for the ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and Senior Member of the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He is an alumnus of the Defense Science Study Group (2018-19).

Featuring Guest Panelist: Sarah Brown, Hadas Kress-Gazit, Aisha Walcott

The next technical talk will be delivered by Raia Hadsell from DeepMind, and it will take place on March 26 at 3pm EST. Keep up to date on this website.

In the last online technical talk, Adam Bry and Hayk Martiros from Skydio explained how their company tackles real-world issues when it comes to drone flying.

Abstract

Skydio is the leading US drone company and the world leader in autonomous flight. Our drones are used for everything from capturing amazing video, to inspecting bridges, to tracking progress on construction sites. At the core of our products is a vision-based autonomy system with seven years of development at Skydio, drawing on decades of academic research. This system pushes the state of the art in deep learning, geometric computer vision, motion planning, and control with a particular focus on real-world robustness. Drones encounter extreme visual scenarios not typically considered by academia nor encountered by cars, ground robots, or AR applications. They are commonly flown in scenes with few or no semantic priors and must deftly navigate thin objects, extreme lighting, camera artifacts, motion blur, textureless surfaces, vibrations, dirt, camera smudges, and fog. These challenges are daunting for classical vision – because photometric signals are simply not consistent and for learning-based methods – because there is no ground truth for direct supervision of deep networks. In this talk we’ll take a detailed look at these issues and the algorithms we’ve developed to tackle them. We will also cover the new capabilities on top of our core navigation engine to autonomously map complex scenes and capture all surfaces, by performing real-time 3D reconstruction across multiple flights.

Biography

Adam is co-founder and CEO at Skydio. He has two decades of experience with small UAS, starting as a national champion R/C airplane aerobatics pilot. As a grad student at MIT, he did award winning research that pioneered autonomous flight for drones, transferring much of what he learned as an R/C pilot into software that enables drones to fly themselves. Adam co-founded Google’s drone delivery project. He currently serves on the FAA’s Drone Advisory Committee. He holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Olin College and an SM in Aero/Astro from MIT. He has co-authored numerous technical papers and patents, and was also recognized on MIT’s TR35 list for young innovators.

Hayk was the first engineering hire at Skydio and he leads the autonomy team. He is an experienced roboticist who develops robust approaches to computer vision, deep learning, nonlinear optimization, and motion planning to bring intelligent robots into the mainstream. His team’s state of the art work in UAV visual localization, obstacle avoidance, and navigation of complex scenarios is at the core of every Skydio drone. He also has an interest in systems architecture and symbolic computation. His previous works include novel hexapedal robots, collaboration between robot arms, micro-robot factories, solar panel farms, and self-balancing motorcycles. Hayk is a graduate of Stanford University and Princeton University.

Featuring Guest Panelist: Davide Scaramuzza and Margaritha Chli

The next technical talk is happening this Friday the 12th of March at 3pm EST. Join Chad Jenkins from the University of Michigan in his talk ‘That Ain’t Right: AI Mistakes and Black Lives’ using this link.

A few days ago, Robotics Today hosted an online seminar with Professor Carlotta Berry from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. In her talk, Carlotta presented the multidisciplinary benefits of robotics in engineering education. In is worth highlighting that Carlotta Berry is one of the 30 women in robotics you need to know about in 2020.

Abstract

This presentation summarizes the multidisciplinary benefits of robotics in engineering education. I will describe how it is used at a primarily undergraduate institution to encourage robotics education and research. There will be a review of how robotics is used in several courses to illustrate engineering design concepts as well as controls, artificial intelligence, human-robot interaction, and software development. This will be a multimedia presentation of student projects in freshman design, mobile robotics, independent research and graduate theses.

Biography

Carlotta A. Berry is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. She has a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Spelman College, bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology, master’s in electrical engineering from Wayne State University, and PhD from Vanderbilt University. She is one of a team of faculty in ECE, ME and CSSE at Rose-Hulman to create and direct the first multidisciplinary minor in robotics. She is the Co-Director of the NSF S-STEM Rose Building Undergraduate Diversity (ROSE-BUD) Program and advisor for the National Society of Black Engineers. She was previously the President of the Technical Editor Board for the ASEE Computers in Education Journal. Dr. Berry has been selected as one of 30 Women in Robotics You Need to Know About 2020 by robohub.org, Reinvented Magazine Interview of the Year Award on Purpose and Passion, Women and Hi Tech Leading Light Award You Inspire Me and Insight Into Diversity Inspiring Women in STEM. She has taught undergraduate courses in Human-Robot Interaction, Mobile Robotics, circuits, controls, signals and system, freshman and senior design. Her research interests are in robotics education, interface design, human-robot interaction, and increasing underrepresented populations in STEM fields. She has a special passion for diversifying the engineering profession by encouraging more women and underrepresented minorities to pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees. She feels that the profession should reflect the world that we live in in order to solve the unique problems that we face.

You can also view past seminars on the Robotics Today YouTube Channel.

About the speaker

Nikolas Martelaro is an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute. Martelaro’s lab focuses on augmenting designer’s capabilities through the use of new technology and design methods. Martelaro’s interest in developing new ways to support designers stems from my interest in creating interactive and intelligent products. Martelaro blends a background in product design methods, interaction design, human-robot interaction, and mechatronic engineering to build tools and methods that allow designers to understand people better and to create more human-centered products. Before moving to the HCII, Nikolas Martelaro was a researcher in the Digital Experiences group at the Accenture Technology Labs. Martelaro graduated with a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford’s Center for Design Research where he was co-advised by Larry Leifer and Wendy Ju.

Abstract

COVID-19 has led to decreases in in-person user research. While designers who work on software can shift to using all digital remote research methods, people who work on hardware systems, including robots, are left with limited options. In this talk, I will discuss some ways the robot design teams can do remote user research now and in the future. I will draw on past work in human-computer interaction as well as my own work in creating systems to allow remote design teams to conduct remote observation and interaction prototyping. While things can be challenging for the user researcher team today, I believe that with some creative new methods, we can expand our abilities to do user research for robotics from anywhere in the world.

Papers covered during the talk

• Exploring the Future of Remote Research. Nikolas Martelaro. New Future of Work 2020.

• Using Remote Controlled Speech Agents to Explore Music Experience in Context. Nikolas Martelaro, Sarah Mennicken, Jennifer Thom, Henriette S. M. Cramer, and Wendy G. Ju. Proceedings of the 2020 ACM on Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, pages 2065-2076.

• The Needfinding Machine. Nikolas Martelaro and Wendy G. Ju. The Social Internet of Things, pages 51-84. Springer, 2018.

A few days ago, Robotics Today hosted an online seminar with Professor Davide Scaramuzza from the University of Zurich. The seminar was recorded, so you can watch it now in case you missed it.

“Robotics Today – A series of technical talks” is a virtual robotics seminar series. The goal of the series is to bring the robotics community together during these challenging times. The seminars are open to the public. The format of the seminar consists of a technical talk live captioned and streamed via Web and Twitter, followed by an interactive discussion between the speaker and a panel of faculty, postdocs, and students that will moderate audience questions.

Abstract

Autonomous quadrotors will soon play a major role in search-and-rescue, delivery, and inspection missions, where a fast response is crucial. However, their speed and maneuverability are still far from those of birds and human pilots. High speed is particularly important: since drone battery life is usually limited to 20-30 minutes, drones need to fly faster to cover longer distances. However, to do so, they need faster sensors and algorithms. Human pilots take years to learn the skills to navigate drones. What does it take to make drones navigate as good or even better than human pilots? Autonomous, agile navigation through unknown, GPS-denied environments poses several challenges for robotics research in terms of perception, planning, learning, and control. In this talk, I will show how the combination of both model-based and machine learning methods united with the power of new, low-latency sensors, such as event cameras, can allow drones to achieve unprecedented speed and robustness by relying solely on onboard computing.

Biography

Davide Scaramuzza (Italian) is a Professor of Robotics and Perception at both departments of Informatics (University of Zurich) and Neuroinformatics (joint between the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich), where he directs the Robotics and Perception Group. His research lies at the intersection of robotics, computer vision, and machine learning, using standard cameras and event cameras, and aims to enable autonomous, agile navigation of micro drones in search and rescue applications. After a Ph.D. at ETH Zurich (with Roland Siegwart) and a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania (with Vijay Kumar and Kostas Daniilidis), from 2009 to 2012, he led the European project sFly, which introduced the PX4 autopilot and pioneered visual-SLAM-based autonomous navigation of micro drones in GPS-denied environments. From 2015 to 2018, he was part of the DARPA FLA program (Fast Lightweight Autonomy) to research autonomous, agile navigation of micro drones in GPS-denied environments. In 2018, his team won the IROS 2018 Autonomous Drone Race, and in 2019 it ranked second in the AlphaPilot Drone Racing world championship. For his research contributions to autonomous, vision-based, drone navigation and event cameras, he won prestigious awards, such as a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career Award, an SNSF-ERC Starting Grant, a Google Research Award, the KUKA Innovation Award, two Qualcomm Innovation Fellowships, the European Young Research Award, the Misha Mahowald Neuromorphic Engineering Award, and several paper awards. He co-authored the book “Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots” (published by MIT Press; 10,000 copies sold) and more than 100 papers on robotics and perception published in top-ranked journals (Science Robotics, TRO, T-PAMI, IJCV, IJRR) and conferences (RSS, ICRA, CVPR, ICCV, CORL, NeurIPS). He has served as a consultant for the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency’s Fukushima Action Plan on Nuclear Safety and several drones and computer-vision companies, to which he has also transferred research results. In 2015, he cofounded Zurich-Eye, today Facebook Zurich, which developed the visual-inertial SLAM system running in Oculus Quest VR headsets. He was also the strategic advisor of Dacuda, today Magic Leap Zurich. In 2020, he cofounded SUIND, which develops camera-based safety solutions for commercial drones. Many aspects of his research have been prominently featured in wider media, such as The New York Times, BBC News, Discovery Channel, La Repubblica, Neue Zurcher Zeitung, and also in technology-focused media, such as IEEE Spectrum, MIT Technology Review, Tech Crunch, Wired, The Verge.

You can also view past seminars on the Robotics Today YouTube Channel.

Talking Robotics is a series of virtual seminars about Robotics and its interaction with other relevant fields, such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Design Research, Human-Robot Interaction, among others. The aim is to promote reflections, dialogues, and a place to network. Talking Robotics happens virtually and bi-weekly, i.e., every other week, allocating 30 min for presentation and 30 min for Q&A and networking. Sessions have a roundtable format where everyone is welcome to share ideas. Recordings and materials are shared in this website.

Abstract

The talk discussed several literature approaches to assess children’s trust towards robots. Calvo argues that the perceived first impression of a social robot’s likability and competence are predictors of children’s judgments of trust in social robots.

Biography

Natalia Calvo is a Ph.D. student at Uppsala University in Sweden. She obtained her master’s degree in Robotics Engineering from the University of Genoa in Italy, and her bachelor’s degree in Mechatronics Engineering from the Nueva Granada Military University in Colombia. She is part of the EU ITN ANIMATAS project. Her research focuses on modelling trust in child-robot educational interactions. Natalia is interested in implementing machine learning models for the understanding of children’s perception of trust in robots. You can read more details about the speaker on this website.

RSS 2020 was held virtually this year, from the RSS Pioneers Workshop on July 11 to the Paper Awards and Farewell on July 16. Many talks are now available online, including 103 accepted papers, each presented as an online Spotlight Talk on the RSS Youtube channel, and of course the plenaries and much of the workshop content as well. We’ve tried to link here to all of the goodness from RSS 2020.

The RSS Keynote on July 15 was delivered by Josh Tenenbaum, Professor of Computational Cognitive Science at MIT in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, CSAIL. Titled “It’s all in your head: Intuitive physics, planning, and problem-solving in brains, minds and machines”.

Abstract: I will overview what we know about the human mind’s internal models of the physical world, including how these models arise over evolution and developmental learning, how they are implemented in neural circuitry, and how they are used to support planning and rapid trial-and-error problem-solving in tool use and other physical reasoning tasks. I will also discuss prospects for building more human-like physical common sense in robots and other AI systems.

RSS 2020 introduces the new RSS Test of Time Award given to highest impact papers published at RSS (and potentially journal versions thereof) from at least ten years ago. Impact may mean that it changed how we think about problems or about robotic design, that it brought fully new problems to the attention of the community, or that it pioneered new approach to robotic design or problem solving. With this award, RSS generally wants to foster the discussion of the long term development of our field. The award is an opportunity to reflect on and discuss the past, which is essential to make progress in the future. The awardee’s keynote is therefore complemented with a Test of Time Panel session devoted to this important discussion.

This year’s Test of Time Awards goes to the pair of papers for pioneering an information smoothing approach to the SLAM problem via square root factorization, its interpretation as a graphical model, and the widely-used GTSAM free software repository.

• Frank Dellaert: Square Root SAM. Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems I, 2005.
• Frank Dellaert and Michael Kaess: Square Root SAM: Simultaneous localization and mapping via square root information smoothing. International Journal of Robotics Research, 25, 1181-1203, 2006.

Abstract: Many estimation, planning and optimal control problems in robotics have an optimization problem at their core. In most of these optimization problems, the objective function is composed of many different factors or terms that are local in nature, i.e., they only depend on a small subset of the variables. 10 years ago the Square Root SAM papers identified factor graphs as a particularly insightful way of modeling this locality structure. Since then we have realized that factor graphs can represent a wide variety of problems across robotics, expose opportunities to improve computational performance, and are beneficial in designing and thinking about how to model a problem, even aside from performance considerations. Many of these principles have been embodied in our evolving open source package GTSAM, which puts factor graphs front and central, and which has been used with great success in a number of state of the art robotics applications. We will also discuss where factor graphs, in our opinion, can break in

The RSS 2020 Plenary Sessions highlighted Early Career Awards for researchers, Byron Boots, Luca Carlone and Jeanette Bohg. Byron Boots is an Associate Professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. Luca Carlone is the Charles Stark Draper Assistant Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Principal Investigator in the Laboratory for Information & Decision Systems (LIDS). Jeannette Bohg is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University.

Title: Perspectives on Machine Learning for Robotics

Abstract: Recent advances in machine learning are leading to new tools for designing intelligent robots: functions relied on to govern a robot’s behavior can be learned from a robot’s interaction with its environment rather than hand-designed by an engineer. Many machine learning methods assume little prior knowledge and are extremely flexible, they can model almost anything! But, this flexibility comes at a cost. The same algorithms are often notoriously data hungry and computationally expensive, two problems that can be debilitating for robotics. In this talk I’ll discuss how machine learning can be combined with prior knowledge to build effective solutions to robotics problems. I’ll start by introducing an online learning perspective on robot adaptation that unifies well-known algorithms and suggests new approaches. Along the way, I’ll focus on the use of simulation and expert advice to augment learning. I’ll discuss how imperfect models can be leveraged to rapidly update simple control policies and imitation can accelerate reinforcement learning. I will also show how we have applied some of these ideas to an autonomous off-road racing task that requires impressive sensing, speed, and agility to complete.

Title: The Future of Robot Perception: Certifiable Algorithms and Real-time High-level Understanding

Abstract: Robot perception has witnessed an unprecedented progress in the last decade. Robots are now able to detect objects and create large-scale maps of an unknown environment, which are crucial capabilities for navigation, manipulation, and human-robot interaction. Despite these advances, both researchers and practitioners are well aware of the brittleness of current perception systems, and a large gap still separates robot and human perception.

This talk discusses two efforts targeted at bridging this gap. The first focuses on robustness. I present recent advances in the design of certifiable perception algorithms that are robust to extreme amounts of noise and outliers and afford performance guarantees. I present fast certifiable algorithms for object pose estimation: our algorithms are “hard to break” (e.g., are robust to 99% outliers) and succeed in localizing objects where an average human would fail. Moreover, they come with a “contract” that guarantees their input-output performance. I discuss the foundations of certifiable perception and motivate how these foundations can lead to safer systems.

The second effort targets high-level understanding. While humans are able to quickly grasp both geometric, semantic, and physical aspects of a scene, high-level scene understanding remains a challenge for robotics. I present our work on real-time metric-semantic understanding and 3D Dynamic Scene Graphs. I introduce the first generation of Spatial Perception Engines, that extend the traditional notions of mapping and SLAM, and allow a robot to build a “mental model” of the environment, including spatial concepts (e.g., humans, objects, rooms, buildings) and their relations at multiple levels of abstraction.
Certifiable algorithms and real-time high-level understanding are key enablers for the next generation of autonomous systems, that are trustworthy, understand and execute high-level human instructions, and operate in large dynamic environments and over and extended period of time

Title: A Tale of Success and Failure in Robotics Grasping and Manipulation

Abstract: In 2007, I was a naïve grad student and started to work on vision-based robotic grasping. I had no prior background in manipulation, kinematics, dynamics or control. Yet, I dove into the field by re-implementing and improving a learning-based method. While making some contributions, the proposed method also had many limitations partly due to the way the problem was framed. Looking back at the entire journey until today, I find that I have learned the most about robotic grasping and manipulation from observing failures and limitations of existing approaches – including my own. In this talk, I want to highlight how these failures and limitations have shaped my view on what may be some of the underlying principles of autonomous robotic manipulation. I will emphasise three points. First, perception and prediction will always be noisy, partial and sometimes just plain wrong. Therefore, one focus of my research is on methods that support decision-making under uncertainty due to noisy sensing, inaccurate models and hard-to-predict dynamics. To this end, I will present a robotic system that demonstrates the importance of continuous, real-time perception and its tight integration with reactive motion generation methods. I will also talk about work that funnels uncertainty by enabling robots to exploit contact constraints during manipulation.

Second, a robot has many more sensors than just cameras and they all provide complementary information. Therefore, one focus of my research is on methods that can exploit multimodal information such as vision and touch for contact-rich manipulation. It is non-trivial to manually design a manipulation controller that combines modalities with very different characteristics. I will present work that uses self-supervision to learn a compact and multimodal representation of visual and haptic sensory inputs, which can then be used to improve the sample efficiency of policy learning. And third, choosing the right robot action representation has a large influence on the success of a manipulation policy, controller or planner. While believing many years that inferring contact points for robotic grasping is futile, I will present work that convinced me otherwise. Specifically, this work uses contact points as an abstraction that can be re-used by a diverse set of robot hands.

Inclusion@RSS is excited to host a panel “On the Future of Robotics” to discuss how we can have an inclusive robotics community and its impact on the future of the field. Moderator: Matt Johnson-Roberson (University of Michigan) with Panelists: Tom Williams (Colorado School of Mines), Eduard Fosch-Villaronga (Leiden University), Lydia Tapia (University of New Mexico), Chris Macnab (University of Calgary), Adam Poulsen (Charles Sturt University), Chad Jenkins (University of Michigan), Kendall Queen (University of Pennsylvania), Naveen Kuppuswamy (Toyota Research Institute).

The RSS community is committed to increasing the participation of groups traditionally underrepresented in robotics (including but not limited to: women, LGBTQ+, underrepresented minorities, and people with disabilities), especially people early in their studies and career. Such efforts are crucial for increasing research capacity, creativity, and broadening the impact of robotics research.

The RSS Pioneers Workshop for senior Ph.D. students and postdocs, was modelled on the highly successful HRI Pioneers Workshop and took place on Saturday July 11. The goal of RSS Pioneers is to bring together a cohort of the world’s top early career researchers to foster creativity and collaborations surrounding challenges in all areas of robotics, as well as to help young researchers navigate their next career stages. The workshop included a mix of research and career talks from senior scholars in the field from both academia and industry, research presentations from attendees and networking activities, with a poster session where Pioneers will get a chance to externally showcase their research.

Content from the various workshops on July 12 and 13 may be available through the various workshop websites.

RSS 2020 Accepted Workshops

Monday, July 13

RSS 2020 Accepted Papers

The RSS Foundation is the governing body behind the Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) conference. The foundation was started and is run by volunteers from the robotics community who believe that an open, high-quality, single-track conference is an important component of an active and growing scientific discipline.

The DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge aims to develop innovative technologies that would augment operations underground.

The SubT Challenge allows teams to demonstrate new approaches for robotic systems to rapidly map, navigate, and search complex underground environments, including human-made tunnel systems, urban underground, and natural cave networks.

The SubT Challenge is organized into two Competitions (Systems and Virtual), each with two tracks (DARPA-funded and self-funded).

The Cave Circuit, the final of three Circuit events, is planned for later this year. Final Event, planned for summer of 2021, will put both Systems and Virtual teams to the test with courses that incorporate diverse elements from all three environments. Teams will compete for up to $2 million in the Systems Final Event and up to $1.5 million in the Virtual Final Event, with additional prizes.

Learn more about the opportunities to participate either virtual or systems Team: https://www.subtchallenge.com/

Dr. Timothy Chung – Program Manager

Dr. Timothy Chung joined DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office as a program manager in February 2016. He serves as the Program Manager for the OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics Program and the DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge. His interests include autonomous/unmanned air vehicles, collaborative autonomy for unmanned swarm system capabilities, distributed perception, distributed decision-making, and counter unmanned system technologies.

Prior to joining DARPA, Dr. Chung served as an Assistant Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School and Director of the Advanced Robotic Systems Engineering Laboratory (ARSENL). His academic interests included modeling, analysis, and systems engineering of operational settings involving unmanned systems, combining collaborative autonomy development efforts with an extensive live-fly field experimentation program for swarm and counter-swarm unmanned system tactics and associated technologies.

Dr. Chung holds a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Cornell University. He also earned Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology.

Learn more about DARPA here: www.darpa.mil

The COVID-19 pandemic is increasing global demand for robots that can 
assist in surgery and healthcare. This symposium focuses on recent 
advances and open problems in robot-assisted tele-surgery and 
tele-medicine and needs for new research and development. The online 
format will encourage active dialogue among faculty, students, 
professionals, and entrepreneurs.

Featuring:
Gary Guthart, CEO, Intuitive Surgical
Robin Murphy, Texas A&M
Pablo Garcia Kilroy, VP Research, Verb Surgical
Allison Okamura, Professor Stanford
David Noonan, Director of Research, Auris Surgical
Jaydev Desai, Director, Georgia Tech Center for Medical Robotics
Nicole Kernbaum, Principal Engineer, Seismic Powered Clothin
Monroe Kennedy III, Professor, Stanford

Presented by the University of California Center for Information 
Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) and the Banatao 
Institute “People and Robots” Initiative, SRI International, and 
Silicon Valley Robotics.

Schedule:

   *  09:30-10:00: Conversation with Robin Murphy, Texas A&M and Director of 
Robotics for Infectious Diseases, and Andra Keay, Director of Silicon 
Valley Robotics
   *  10:00-10:30: Conversation with Gary Guthart, CEO Intuitive Surgical 
and Ken Goldberg, Director of CITRIS People and Robots Initiative
   *  10:30-11:00: Conversation with Pablo Garcia Kilroy, VP Research 
Verb Surgical and Tom Low, Director of Robotics at SRI International
   *  11:00-11:15: Coffee Break
   *  11:15-11:45: Conversation with David Noonan, Director of Research, 
Auris Surgical and Nicole Kernbaum
   *  11:45-12:45: Keynote by Jaydev Desai, Director, Georgia Tech Center 
for Medical Robotics
   *  12:45-01:15: Conversation with Allison Okamura, Stanford and Monroe 
Kennedy III, Stanford

 Andrew Davison (Imperial College London)

Abstract: To enable the next generation of smart robots and devices which can truly interact with their environments, Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) will progressively develop into a general real-time geometric and semantic `Spatial AI’ perception capability. I will give many examples from our work on gradually increasing visual SLAM capability over the years. However, much research must still be done to achieve true Spatial AI performance. A key issue is how estimation and machine learning components can be used and trained together as we continue to search for the best long-term scene representations to enable intelligent interaction. Further, to enable the performance and efficiency required by real products, computer vision algorithms must be developed together with the sensors and processors which form full systems, and I will cover research on vision algorithms for non-standard visual sensors and graph-based computing architectures.

Biography: Andrew Davison is Professor of Robot Vision and Director of the Dyson Robotics Laboratory at Imperial College London. His long-term research focus is on SLAM (Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping) and its evolution towards general `Spatial AI’: computer vision algorithms which enable robots and other artificial devices to map, localise within and ultimately understand and interact with the 3D spaces around them. With his research group and collaborators he has consistently developed and demonstrated breakthrough systems, including MonoSLAM, KinectFusion, SLAM++ and CodeSLAM, and recent prizes include Best Paper at ECCV 2016 and Best Paper Honourable Mention at CVPR 2018. He has also had strong involvement in taking this technology into real applications, in particular through his work with Dyson on the design of the visual mapping system inside the Dyson 360 Eye robot vacuum cleaner and as co-founder of applied SLAM start-up SLAMcore. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2017.

Robotics Today Seminars

“Robotics Today – A series of technical talks” is a virtual robotics seminar series. The goal of the series is to bring the robotics community together during these challenging times. The seminars are scheduled on Fridays at 1PM EDT (10AM PDT) and are open to the public. The format of the seminar consists of a technical talk live captioned and streamed via Web and Twitter (@RoboticsSeminar), followed by an interactive discussion between the speaker and a panel of faculty, postdocs, and students that will moderate audience questions.

Stay up to date with upcoming seminars with the Robotics Today Google Calendar (or download the .ics file) and view past seminars on the Robotics Today Youtube Channel. And follow us on Twitter!

Upcoming Seminars

Seminars will be broadcast at 1PM EST (10AM PST) here.

22 May 2020: Leslie Kaelbling (MIT)

29 May 2020: Allison Okamura (Stanford)

12 June 2020: Anca Dragan (UC Berkeley)

Past Seminars

We’ll post links to the recorded seminars soon!

Organizers

Contact

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

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

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

• #ERF2015 webcam: Horizon2020 project pitches Part I
• #ERF2015 webcam: Horizon2020 project pitches part II
• The Drone Center’s Weekly Roundup: 5/18/15

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

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
• Beginner’s guide to the humanoid robot challenge (DRC)
• Robots Podcast: Dynamic systems

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

“Auklet flock Shumagins 1986” by D. Dibenski -Wikimedia

Imagine a swarm of microscopic robots that we inject into the vascular system: the swarm swims to the source of the problem, then either delivers therapeutics or undertakes microsurgery directly.

That was how I opened a short invited talk at the Royal Society of Medicine on 5 February, at a meeting themed The Future of Robotics in Surgery. The talk was a wonderful opportunity for me to introduce swarm intelligence and speculate on the likelihood of surgical micro-robot swarms, while at the same time learning about robot surgery. Here are the slides from my talk (with links to YouTube videos where available).

The talk was in three parts.

First I introduced swarm intelligence, and its artificial counterpart swarm robotics. I showed, with examples from two of my students, how – with very simple rules – a swarm of robots can keep together as a swarm, while moving toward a beacon. Then, with a phagocyte-like behaviour, encapsulate the beacon. In our case these were lab robots moving toward an infra-red beacon, but it’s not hard to imagine the same behavioural rules in a microscopic swarm swimming toward the source of a chemical marker (chemotaxis). I then gave two examples of the state of the art in swarm robotics: SYMBRION and (my current favourite) TERMES. I wanted to illustrate emergent physical interaction, in these two cases swarm self-assembly and swarm construction, respectively.

In part two I outlined what is by far the biggest problem: actually engineering robots at the micro-scale. Here I drew upon the examples from my book Robotics: a very short introduction; a section called A swarm of medical microrobots.  Start with cm sized robots. These already exist in the form of pillbots and I reference the work of Paolo Dario’s lab in this direction. Then get 10 times smaller to mm sized robots. Here we’re at the limit of making robots with conventional mechatronics. The almost successful I-SWARM project prototyped remarkable robots measuring 4 x 4 x 3mm. But now shrink by another 3 orders of magnitude to microbots, measured in micrometers. This is how small robots would have to be in order to swim through and access (most of) the vascular system. Here we are far beyond conventional materials and electronics, but amazingly work is going on to control bacteria. In the example I give from the lab of Sylvain Martel, swarms of magnetotactic bacteria are steered by an external magnetic field and, interestingly, tracked in an MRI scanner.

In the final part of my talk I introduce the work of my colleague Sabine Hauert, on swarms of nanoparticles for cancer nanomedicine. These 5 – 500nm particles are controlled by changing their body size, material, coating and cargo so – in true swarm fashion – the way the nanoparticle swarm moves and interacts with much larger normal and tumour cells is an emergent property of the way the nanoparticles individually interact and cooperate. Sabine and her collaborators have created an online tool called NanoDoc, which allows anyone to edit the design of nanoparticles then run simulations to see how their designs perform. In this way the task of searching the huge design space is crowd-sourced. In parallel Sabine is also running mesoscale embodied simulations, using the Harvard Kilobots.

I concluded by suggesting that engineering micro or nanobots is not the only major challenge. At least as important are: (a) how would you program the swarm, and (b) how would such a swarm be approved for clinical use? But a deeply interesting question is the nature of the human-swarm interface. If a swarm of surgical microbots should become a practical proposition would we treat the swarm as a microscopic instrument under the surgeon’s control, or a smart drug that does surgery?

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

• Crowdsourcing new strategies for cancer treatment: Towards swarming nanobots
• Thousand-robot swarm self-assembles into arbitrary shapes
• Micro-robotics and medicine: Interview with Toshio Fukuda
• Minimally-invasive eye surgery on the horizon as magnetically-guided microbots move toward clinical trials
• Better micro-actuators to transport materials in liquids
• Micro bio-bots powered by beating heart cells
• Robots Podcast: Bacteria-propelled microrobots
• Swarmbots: James McLurkin on why, how, and when we will see swarm robotics in practice
• ShanghAI Lectures: Samia Nefti-Mezziani “Non-rational Particle Swarm Optimization”

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

Below are some key takeaway points from the talk (with some embellishment by me), followed by a video clip of the talk itself.

Physical Safety

• One way to determine how close people can be to autonomous vehicle is to look at the speed with which you can stop the vehicle, and the distance traveled in that time. When looking at the time to stop the vehicle you need to look at human reaction time, signal latencies, and mechanical stopping time of vehicle.
• You can improve the above time by having an independent safety critical system onboard that evaluates safety at run-time and can stop vehicle faster than a human can. I really like this idea and have taken a similar (more basic) approach in the past

Testing Motivation

• IEC-61508 is a key safety standard for determining how safe a system needs to be. It provides guidance on what traits map to a given safety integrity level. However, dynamically changing parameters and AI generally make a system fall into the NOT safe categories.
• For safety critical systems we need to look at the worst case scenarios (and not the nominal or best case).
• We need to test, since some scenarios will violate assumptions that we did not even know that we made.
• “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong” – Albert Einstein
• Software cares about the range of the inputs and not necessarily about the duration that you run the code for. (Duration can also matter and needs to be tested for memory usage, and other unexpected parameters that will only show up after code has been running for awhile.)
• The value of a test is not the test, but how you improve the system and learn from it

Testing Approach

• Field testing is very important. Field test till errors diminish. Then simulate system for the “next million miles.”
• The question becomes how to simulate and error check the code. One method is with robustness testing, which lets the software use automated methods to find the problems, so that the developers know what to fix.
• With robustness testing you can apply random inputs to the system and see what causes it to crash or hang. This lets you simulate inputs and not just scenarios.
• You can also probabilistically modify the real world inputs that are entering your system, and verify the outputs.
• Use system requirements to generate safety rules that are checked in real-time. The great thing about safety rules is that if a rule ever fails, you know something is wrong, and the code/test/robot can stop.
• You can also add a dictionary test on your code, where you control the inputs to see what the outputs will be. You can build a dictionary over time so that as you continue testing the system you do not reintroduce old errors that you have seen already.
• Temporal logic is useful to create rules such as “get a message within x seconds”; as opposed to “a message must respond eventually”. Tests need to reflect that.

Things that commonly fail testing:

• Improper handling of floating point numbers (out-of-bounds, NaN, infinite (inf), etc.
• Array indexing
• Memory issues. Leaking, too much specified, not enough specified, buffer overflows, etc.
• Time going backwards and old/stale data (I have seen this error more times than I can remember)
• Problems handling dynamic state

And now the part you have been waiting for:

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

• Programming safety into self-driving cars
• Safety concerns for collaborative robots
• ShanghAI Lectures: Weidong Chen “Enhancing Autonomy and Safety of Assistive Robots”
• Quadrocopter failsafe algorithm: Recovery after propeller loss

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

In this guest lecture, Inman Harvey from the University of Sussex, UK, talks about Representation and its issues.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence, run and organized by Rolf Pfeifer (from 2009 till 2012), Fabio Bonsignorio (since 2013), and me with partners around the world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKPEN4wR9tc

The ShanghAI Lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2011-12-15

In this guest lecture, Kevin Warwick from the University of Reading, UK, talks about a closed-loop interface between a biological network and a robot, multi-electrode arrays, and cyborgs.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence, run and organized by Rolf Pfeifer (from 2009 till 2012), Fabio Bonsignorio (since 2013), and me with partners around the world. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pudYqj0EwbA

The ShanghAI Lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2011-12-08

In this guest lecture, Tamás Haidegger from Budapest University of Technology and Economics in Hungary, talks about Computer-Integrated Surgery, gives a market overview of surgical robots, and discusses some of the trends in this field.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence, run and organized by Rolf Pfeifer (from 2009 till 2012), Fabio Bonsignorio (since 2013), and me with partners around the world. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xWDGaM30V4

Slides

The ShanghAI Lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2011-12-15

In this guest lecture, Rüdiger Dillmann from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, talks about paradigms for robot learning and the properties of learning by demonstration.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence, run and organized by Rolf Pfeifer (from 2009 till 2012), Fabio Bonsignorio (since 2013), and me with partners around the world. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGe6IrDzc_o

The ShanghAI Lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2011-12-15

In this guest lecture, Weidong Chen from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, talks about the design of assistive robots, especially a robotic wheelchair, and outlines challenges and approaches.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence, run and organized by Rolf Pfeifer (from 2009 till 2012), Fabio Bonsignorio (since 2013), and me with partners around the world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U93ejym07ak

Weidong Chen received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Control Engineering in 1990 and 1993, and Ph.D. degree in Mechatronics in 1996, respectively, all from the Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China. Since 2005 he has been a professor of the Department of Automation at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China, and director of the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Processing. From 2003 to 2004, he was a visiting associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The Ohio State University. Dr. Chen’s research interests include autonomous mobile robot, multi-robot cooperation, and micro manipulation.

The ShanghAI Lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2011-12-08

In this guest lecture, Barbara Webb from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, talks about using robots to model biology, human and insect brains, and cricket-robot experiments.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence, run and organized by Rolf Pfeifer (from 2009 till 2012), Fabio Bonsignorio (since 2013), and me with partners around the world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjoWbbh7m0M

The ShanghAI Lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2011-12-01

In this guest lecture, Dustin Li from the Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xian, China, talks about the design of a robot that autonomously delivers items in an office building.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoM6KBobB5k

Xiaoan (Dustin) Li received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Information Engineering in 1987, Control Theory and Application in 1990, and Ph.D. degree in Computer Application Technology in 2000, respectively, all from the department of computer, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an city, China. Since 1997 he has been an associate professor. From May 2008 to May 2009, he was a visiting scholar in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Michigan State University. Dr. Li is the founder of the Soccer Robot team in Northwestern Polytechnical University, and the chief advisor from 2003 to 2009. His research interests include computational intelligence, learning and cooperation of multi-agent robot system, the real-time intelligent control.

Slides

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence, run and organized by Rolf Pfeifer (from 2009 till 2012), Fabio Bonsignorio (since 2013), and me with partners around the world.

The ShanghAI Lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2011-11-24

In this guest lecture, Thierry Bücheler from the AI Lab, University of Zurich, Switzerland, talks about collective intelligence, quality and critical mass, and gives examples of where collective intelligence can be useful.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence, run and organized by Rolf Pfeifer (from 2009 till 2012), Fabio Bonsignorio (since 2013), and me with partners around the world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGZxL5aREQQ

The ShanghAI Lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2011-11-17

Artificial ontogenetic development has been nicely demonstrated by many computer simulation studies in the past. There are, however, still a number of technical challenges in bringing it to the real world. In this presentation, I will introduce some potential solutions to this challenging problem, solutions that stem from soft robotics research. More specifically, we demonstrate how autonomous construction, autonomous body extension, and autonomous robot climbing locomotion can be achieved by exploiting unconventional soft material such as Hot Melt Adhesives.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence, run and organized by Rolf Pfeifer (from 2009 till 2012), Fabio Bonsignorio (since 2013), and me with partners around the world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV3wxfJ0gKg

Slides

The ShanghAI Lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2011-11-17

In this guest lecture, Josh Bongard from the University of Vermont (USA) and co-author of How the body shapes the way we think (MIT Press), talks about bio-inspired robotics and how engineering may benefit from evolutionary robotics and morphological scaffolding.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence, run and organized by Rolf Pfeifer (from 2009 till 2012), Fabio Bonsignorio (since 2013), and me with partners around the world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mykg2KpT87A

Slides

The ShanghAI Lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2011-11-10

In this guest lecture, Koh Hosoda from Osaka University, Japan, talks about human and humanoid intelligence, movement, and bouncing, and introduces the musculoskeletal infant robot Pneuborn-7II.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence, run and organized by Rolf Pfeifer (from 2009 till 2012), Fabio Bonsignorio (since 2013), and me with partners around the world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIbBMGa-hAs

Koh Hosoda received the Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering from Kyoto University, Japan in 1993. From 1993 to 1997, he was an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering for Computer-Controlled Machinery, Osaka University. From 1997 to 2010 he was an Associate Professor of the Department of Adaptive Machine Systems, Osaka University. From 2005 to 2010, he was a group leader of the JST Asada ERATO Project, as well. From Apr 2010, he has been a Professor of the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Osaka University.
He stayed at the AI laboratory, Zurich as a guest professor through Apr 1998 to Mar 1999.

The ShanghAI Lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2011-11-10

In this guest lecture, Craig Turnbull and Barry Richards from Electroimpact talk about robots in aircraft manufacturing.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence, run and organized by Rolf Pfeifer (from 2009 till 2012), Fabio Bonsignorio (since 2013), and me with partners around the world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8QqDdhiQ18

The ShanghAI Lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2011-11-10

This presentation introduces Cyberbotics Ltd. with a little bit of history (where it came from), then it presents the Webots software that allows researchers and students to develop fast prototypes and simulations of mobile robots. Webots is being used in over than 875 universities and research centers world wide for both research and education. The end of the presentation includes a live demo of the new upcoming features in Webots: display of collision detection, interactive application of forces and torques to objects while the simulation is running.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence, run and organized by Rolf Pfeifer (from 2009 till 2012), Fabio Bonsignorio (since 2013), and me with partners around the world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWsd4Fhh0gQ

Olivier Michel is the founder and CEO of Cyberbotics Ltd. This company develops the Webots software used in the ShanghAI lectures. Webots is a fast prototyping and simulation software for mobile robots. More information about it can be found here: http://www.cyberbotics.com.

The ShanghAI Lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2011-11-03

In this guest lecture, Fabio Bonsignorio from University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain, talks about issues with innovation and robotic startup companies.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence, run and organized by Rolf Pfeifer (from 2009 till 2012), Fabio Bonsignorio (since 2013), and me with partners around the world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GUcpvPSSxU

Fabio Bonsignorio is founder and CEO of Heron Robots, a company active in the development of advanced robotics solutions. From September 2009 he is a professor at the University Carlos III of Madrid (www.uc3m.es, roboticslab.uc3m.es) as Santander Chair of Excellence in Robotics. He has been working in the R&D departments of several major Italian and American companies, mainly in the applications of intelligent systems and technology transfer with cordination/management responsibilities for some 20 years. He held academic research positions on robotics and lectured in robotics, industrial control systems and machine design at the Department of Mechanics of the University of Genova. He is author or co-author of about 40 publications in the areas of robotics, cognition and manufacturing systems in the last three years, since he became an almost full time researcher. His first paper on robot control dates back to 1985.

He is puzzled by 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 coordinates the EURON Special Interest Group on Good Experimental Methodology and Benchmarking in Robotics and is a board member of EURON III.

The ShanghAI Lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2011-11-03

In this guest lecture, Claude Patrick Siegenthaler from Switzerland gives a brief introduction to economics and markets and relates them to intelligent agents.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence, run and organized by Rolf Pfeifer (from 2009 till 2012), Fabio Bonsignorio (since 2013), and me with partners around the world.

Please note that due to technical problems, the slides are not displayed during the first few minutes of the recording – we apologize for the glitch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOTSPvngvr0

Slides

The ShanghAI Lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2011-10-27

In this guest lecture, Toshiyuki Nakagaki from Future University Hakodate, Japan, talks about his experiments with true slime mold and its abilities to find the shortest path to a food source.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence, run and organized by Rolf Pfeifer (from 2009 till 2012), Fabio Bonsignorio (since 2013), and me with partners around the world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxWum21k6dU

The ShanghAI Lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2011-10-20

In this guest lecture, Minoru Asada from Osaka University, Japan, talks about combining developmental psychology, neuroscience, and robotics into “Cognitive Developmental Robotics”, a new paradigm that provides an understanding of ourselves and at the same time serves as a design theory of humanoid symbiosis with us.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence, run and organized by Rolf Pfeifer (from 2009 till 2012), Fabio Bonsignorio (since 2013), and me with partners around the world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWzqJrvHRow

The ShanghAI Lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

Watch Rolf Pfeifer’s farewell lecture at the University of Zurich, broadcasting live on Robohub Friday May 23, 2014 (18:00–19:30 CEST/16:00–17:30 UTC).

One of the most prominent figures in the “embodied intelligence” approach to AI, and the intellectual father of the Roboy humanoid, Rolf Pfeifer and his Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AI Lab) at the University of Zurich have been a force of influence on the fields of robotics and AI for almost 30 years. He is the co-author of the seminal AI text How the Body Shapes the Way We Think, and also initiated the ShanghAI Lectures, a lecture series that brings together people from various cultural and linguistic backgrounds who share the common vision of building robots in order to better understand intelligence.

On the occasion of his retirement from the University of Zurich, Rolf will deliver a farewell lecture in which he reviews his research from the past three decades and discusses its implications for the future with other renowned researchers in AI who have influenced his work. Roboy, the AI Lab’s tendon-driven humanoid robot, will join the event and welcome the audience.

After leaving the University of Zurich, Pfeifer moves on to other projects. He has plans to pursue technology transfer in Switzerland, Japan, and China, in particular a robot lounge in Shanghai where robots (among others) care for the well-being of the guests. He will also be a visiting professor in Japan (Osaka, Chiba) and China (Shanghai). His main goals will be to bring the results from basic research into practice, and to communicate them to a broad audience.

Rolf Pfeifer’s farewell lecture took place on Friday May 23, 18:00–19:30 CEST at the University of Zurich main building.

The talk begins after the opening remarks, at the 05:20 mark.

The talk begins after the opening remarks, at the 05:20 mark.

Tweets about “#RolfGoodbAI”

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2011-10-20

In this guest lecture, Yukie Nagai from Osaka University, Japan, talks about teaching infants and robots, attention, and scaffolding.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence, run and organized by Rolf Pfeifer (from 2009 till 2012), Fabio Bonsignorio (since 2013), and me with partners around the world. 

(We apologize for the technical issues in the videoconference that prevented us from showing some of Yukie Nagai’s videos.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rZR8cZf6GQ

Slides

Yukie Nagai’s home page

The ShanghAI Lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2011-10-13

This talks provides a summary of the current and future market places, key application areas, history of robotics and future trends.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence, run and organized by Rolf Pfeifer (from 2009 till 2012), Fabio Bonsignorio (since 2013), and me with partners around the world. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGgYqakUHHw

Alan Spreckley has worked for ABB since September 2003 where he has held the position of UK Channel Partner Manager for the last 4 years whilst still retaining responsibility for the Food and Beverage Segment. Alan originally joined ABB in the role of UK Segment manager – Consumer Industries with responsibility for the sales and implementation of robotic automation within food, beverage, pharmaceutical and personal care application areas.

Since joining ABB Alan has been involved in a number of industry related events which have seen him give presentations and key note speeches at many seminars and exhibitions including speaking on behalf of BARA (British Automation & Robotics Association) at Foodex Meatex 2008 and being part of an ABB team which lobbied parliament and hosted a reception at the Houses of Commons in May 2007 promoting automation in UK manufacturing and environmental awareness throughout industry. A further ABB initiative followed this which saw Alan part of a team which took a Roadshow around the UK promoting robotic automation where he gave presentations at 14 events including Scottish Food and Drink Processing and Wrexham Business Week over a 6 week period. This proved to be an extremely successful series of events which raised the profile of robotics within UK manufacturing in general with many food processing companies attending. In 2007 Alan won the ABB European Sales Award for most strategic sales within the Food and Beverage sector which recognised the efforts and commitment of ABB UK in general to the Food and Beverage industries.
Alan has more recently presented at Appetite for Engineering, Foodex exhibition and been a guest lecturer on automation at a number of Universities

Alan is a member of the Technical Advisory Group (TAG) to CenFRA (Centre for Food and Robotics Automation) and is on the board of The Food Processing Farady Partnership where his industry experience enables him to make a significant contribution. Alan also represents ABB Robotics on FMEG (Food Manufacturing Engineering Group).

Alan’s previous experience has seen him involved in robotic and automation solutions, primarily within the consumer industries for over 25 years with various Robotics and Automation Companies. Prior to this Alan worked with systems houses in Technical, Project Management and Sales roles covering a diverse range of application areas globally, a number of which were Food industry based.

The ShanghAI Lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

Lecture 10: Future trends

This lecture, which I hosted at the from the University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain, recaps the whole 2013 series and looks at the future of AI, Robotics and …the Shanghai Lectures themselves :-)

“How the body shapes the way we think – principles and insights ” by Rolf Pfeifer

In yet another great lecture, Rolf summarizes the main ideas and concepts we have reviewed in the Shanghai Lectures. Check here for his thought-stimulating insights:

Guest lecture: “Autonomous Service Robots that Can Ask for Help” by Manuela Veloso

In this guest lecture Prof. Manuela Veloso, very appropriately H. A. Simon Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, gives us a compressed survey of her research. She also shows us  how we may work around current limitations of AI and Robotics by simply letting robots ask for our help! What does she mean by this? Watch her lecture here:

Manuela Veloso is President of AAAI, past president of the RoboCup Federation, and a fellow of IEEE, AAAI and AAAS.

That’s all, folks, for 2013! Stay tuned, the best is yet to come!

About the ShanghAI Lectures

While in the classical approach “intelligence” was essentially viewed as information processing taking place in the brain, the more recent insight that interaction with the environment is of central importance is gaining acceptance. This has led to the metaphor of embodiment, i.e., that intelligence is always a property of an entire organism — an idea that has far-reaching implications and often leads to surprising insights, but which has not so far been widely exploited in industry practice.

The ShanghAI Lectures project aims to:

• Build a sustainable community of students and researchers in the area of Embodied Intelligence
• Make education and knowledge on cutting-edge scientific topics accessible to everyone
• Explore novel methods of knowledge transfer
• Overcome the complexity of a multi-cultural and interdisciplinary learning context
• Bring global teaching to a new level

These lectures about Natural and Artificial Intelligence have been held via videoconference at the University Carlos III of Madrid in Spain, the University of Zurich in Switzerland, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna of Pisa, Italy, Humboldt University Berlin in Germany, University of Plymouth and University of Salford in the UK, and 10 other universities around the globe. Students from the participating universities are still working together on the exercises, using Webots by Cyberbotics, and Ludobots by the University of Vermont.

The lectures have also been streamed to allow remote participation to anybody.

The ShanghAI Lectures differ from ‘conventional’ MOOCs as they exploit telecommunication technology to build a global, distributed lecture hall that allows rich interaction rather than simply implementing the good old fashioned TV broadcasting model on a different medium. They also differ from other AI courses as they propose a new paradigm approach to embodied cognition (a.k.a. AI and Robotics). It is a kind of Copernican revolution with respect to GOFAI and its robotics application — and thus a research program for the coming decades.

This year I coordinated the lectures, with help from Prof. Rolf Pfeifer and Dr. Nathan Labhart at the University of Zurich . Rolf Pfeifer and I provided the context (introduction, moderation, and conclusion). As always, there were 2-3  invited guest lectures each week.

 

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2010-11-18

In this guest lecture, Simon Grand from the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, talks about building intelligent companies.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence, run and organized by Rolf Pfeifer (from 2009 till 2012), Fabio Bonsignorio (since 2013), and me with partners around the world. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82nEo8usN-M

Slides

Dr. Simon Grand is an economist and entrepreneur. Since 2001, he is the founder and academic director of RISE management research, Institute of Systemic Management and Public Governance, University of St. Gallen HSG. His research focus is strategic entrepreneurship and management in the context of innovation and change. Areas of expertise include computer science, software engineering, life sciences, pharma, cognitive sciences, artificial intelligence, fashion design, and creative industries. In 2008 he became a founder and partner at TATIN Scoping Complexity in Zurich. Their focus is entrepreneurial strategy and strategy design in the context of innovation and change, and corporate governance. Since 2007, he is also senior researcher at the Institute for Art and Design Research at the Academy of Art and Design in Basel where his research focuses on design entrepreneurship, strategy design, design fiction, critical companies. Since 1998, he is research associate and senior lecturer at the University of St. Gallen HSG, with a focus on strategic management and entrepreneurship, management theory, technological innovation, and epistemology of management research. Dr. Grand studied economics, sociology and philosophy at the University of Zurich where he also completed his doctoral work at the Institute for Management Research. From 1990 to 1993 he was a research associate in the area of financial markets at the Swiss National Bank, and from 1996 to 1997 he was a research fellow in philosophy and epistemology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

The ShanghAI Lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2010-11-18

Sensorimotor interaction between an agent and its environment seems to be the key ingredient to develop intelligent behaviour. In this talk, the importance of interaction is shown with a number of examples from robotics research in interaction and imitation. The prerequisites for imitation learning are investigated and different methods for creating body maps and identifying behaviour are presented.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence, run and organized by Rolf Pfeifer (from 2009 till 2012), Fabio Bonsignorio (since 2013), and me with partners around the world. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sz5HeTU3qTY

Slides

The ShanghAI Lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2010-10-21

In this guest presentation, Patrick van der Smagt talks about biomimetic approaches to robot control, kinematics, grasping, and ways to use the human body to control robots.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence, run and organized by Rolf Pfeifer (from 2009 till 2012), Fabio Bonsignorio (since 2013), and me with partners around the world. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0ULXgISRsw

Van der Smagt is head of terrestrial robotics and bionics at the Institute of Robotics and Dynamics of the German Aerospace Center (DLR). He leads various EC projects, focusing on biomimetic robotics, with the goal of analyzing human motion behaviour and constructing the next generation of robots. This involves measuring and modelling limbs, but also understanding the underlying neural mechanisms.

To match the dexterity of the human upper extremities, van der Smagt analyses various aspects of the human biological components (using magnetic resonance tomography, sonography, electrode implantation, biophysics, and other tools).

The ShanghAI Lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

Lecture 9: Towards a theory of intelligence

This lecture, which I hosted at the the University Carlos III (Madrid, Spain), suggests principles and design guidelines for the development of embodied intelligent systems that are more similar to animal-like intelligence than what has been proposed so far. How to build a self-organizing embodied intelligence? It’s a difficult challenge, but you may find some clues here:

Guest lecture: “Evolution of Morphological Complexity” by Josh Bongard

In this guest lecture Prof. Josh Bongard from the University of Vermont (USA) shows how the evolution of morphological complexity we observe in nature can actually be reproduced in artificial simulated computational models, and gives us some insights on the very core issues of embodied intelligence. Curious? Watch his talk:

Guest lecture: “Developing intelligence in humanoid robots” by Giorgio Metta

Prof. Giorgio Metta, the Director of the iCub facitily at the IIT, Genova (Italy) shows how the problem of developing cognitive capabilities in a robo-toddler is approached on the popular iCub platform. The iCub is now used by many labs around the world as a test-rig for the study of embodied intelligence. An example was given by Angelo Cangelosi, from the University of Plymouth in one the earlier lectures of this year’s ShanghAI edition.  Learn about the development of intelligence in robot babies here:

Guest lecture: “From Embodied Intelligence To Fetal Development – A Quest for The Fundamentals of Humanoid Intelligence” by Yasuo Kuniyoshi

An even more radical approach to the study of developmental learning in embodied systems (based on the synthetic methodology) is pursued by Prof. Yasuo Kuniyoshi, from the University of Tokyo. Kuniyoshi is an outstanding researcher in robotics and embodied intelligence. If you wish to really understand intelligence, perhaps you should begin with the fetus…  Don’t miss this strange but fascinating talk:

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2010-12-16

In this guest lecture, Rafael Núñez from the University of California, San Diego, USA, talks about Mathematics as a paradox for embodiment and cognitive mechanisms in conceptual systems and human imagination.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence, run and organized by Rolf Pfeifer (from 2009 till 2012), Fabio Bonsignorio (since 2013), and me with partners around the world. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muPMMgRwf3g

The ShanghAI Lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2010-12-16

The lecture starts with a short introduction to the Interactive Robots and Media Lab and the United Arab Emirates. Then, it continues by exploring some basic requirements towards creating Situated Conversational Assistants, i.e. devices with sensing, actuation, and spoken natural language which can assist humans in various tasks.

A concrete example of such a device is presented: Ripley the Robot, a manipulator robot with vision and speech that can serve motor commands, answer questions about the current or past situations, and get information about the current state of the world through language. In the context of such devices, a number of considerations are introduced, which then lead to the Symbol Grounding Problem, a philosophical problem which is shown to be at the heart of attempts towards building such embodied agents that can talk about their surroundings – which cannot just “plug-and-play” with traditional NLP approaches.

The symbol grounding problem is discussed, as well as its relation to semantics and semiotics, and then three practical pathways towards real-world solutions to the problem that promise to enable wider application of Situated Conversational Assistants are introduced. Then, Grounded Situation Models are briefly discussed, followed by a very quick glimpse of other requirements towards conversational robots.

The lecture finishes with a brief look at the FaceBots social robots, which utilize and publish social information on the internet in order to create sustainable human-robot relationships, as well as the Ibn Sina arabic speaking conversational robot and the modalities available for tele-participation in the interactive theatre that is built around him.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence, run and organized by Rolf Pfeifer (from 2009 till 2012), Fabio Bonsignorio (since 2013), and me with partners around the world. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phL1-FiRwUQ

Dr. Nikolaos Mavridis, PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has taught, written about, researched, and built Intelligent Systems and Robots, having been active in the area since his early youth. Currently he is serving as Ass. Professor at New York University in Abu Dhabi. He is the founder of IRML (the Interactive Robots and Media Lab), which achieved wide publicity for “Ibn Sina”, the world’s first Arabic-Language Android Robot, as well as “FaceBots”, Microsoft-award-recipient Social Robots which access info and publish on FaceBook. His past work includes “Ripley”, a language-learning robot with abilities comparable to those assessed by the token test, a test administered to 3-year-old children. He is a member of the IEEE, has served in numerous leadership positions in the past, is now a TEDx curator and has been a TEDx speaker twice.

Watch Dr. Mavridis at:

• TEDx Athens “One Thousand Eyes, One Thousand Hands”
• TEDx Al Ain “Growing Robots in the Desert”

The ShanghAI Lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2010-12-16

Embodied agents have a material existence whilst audiences share this very same world and space. This lecture explores the far-reaching and often surprising implications of embodiment, both from the perspective of the audience and of the robotic agents in Robotic Arts, which empower intangible contributions from the cultural context, the suspension of disbelief and the attribution of intention towards any outside physical objects acting upon the world.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence, run and organized by Rolf Pfeifer (from 2009 till 2012), Fabio Bonsignorio (since 2013), and me with partners around the world. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_JSIqb_TAA

Louis-Philippe Demers makes large-scale installations and performances. His main areas of work are entertainment robotics and interaction design. Over the past two decades, he participated in more than seventy artistic and stage productions and has built more than 300 machines. His projects can be found in theatre, opera, subway stations, art museums, science museums, music events and trade shows.

Demers’ works have been featured at major venues such as Lille 2004, Expo 1992 and 2000, Sonambiente, ISEA, Siggraph and Sonar. He received three mentions at Ars Electronica, the Distinction of Prix Ars 96, the first prize of Vida 2.0, a mention for the Tiller Girls at Vida 12.0, the Interactive prize for Lightforms 98 and six prizes for Devolution including two Helpmann Awards, the Australian equivalent of the Broadway’s Tony.

Demers was Professor of Digital Media and Exhibit Design/Scenography at the Hochschule fuer Gestaltung, the academic institution affiliated to the world renowned Zentrum fuer Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM, Germany). Since he joined the Interaction and Entertainment Research Centre and the newly founded School of Art, Design and Media at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU, Singapore).

The ShanghAI Lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

This lecture hosted by Prof. Samia Nefti-Meziani from the University of Salford, Manchester, UK, is about higher education and industrial impact of the ‘ShanghAI paradigm’. You should not be surprised to see early glimpses of the next industrial revolution enabled by intelligent machines in Manchester – this was the iconic example of industrial city during the very first industrial revolution.

“ITN Marie Curie Network SMART-E: Advanced Robotics for Sustainable Manufacturing in Europe” by  Samia Nefti-Meziani

Prof. Samia Nefti-Meziani shows how robotics and AI/cognition can concretely help in both industry and in everyday life. She also announces the newly funded research network on the application of the Shanghai concepts to the industrial world – making this lecture more than just an ‘Academic chat’. Want to know more? Watch Samia’s lecture:

Guest lecture: “Robotics at Festo – From Bionics to Industrial & Educational Robots” by Dirk Pensky

Dr. Pensky is a high-level manager at Festo, which is headquartered in Germany. In this guest lecture he shows us the ubercool bioinspired robotics systems developed by his company. If you want to stay informed on his cutting-edge research, watch his talk:

About the ShanghAI Lectures

While in the classical approach “intelligence” was essentially viewed as information processing taking place in the brain, the more recent insight that interaction with the environment is of central importance is gaining acceptance. This has led to the metaphor of embodiment, i.e., that intelligence is always a property of an entire organism — an idea that has far-reaching implications and often leads to surprising insights, but which has not so far been widely exploited in industry practice.

The ShanghAI Lectures project aims to:

• Build a sustainable community of students and researchers in the area of Embodied Intelligence
• Make education and knowledge on cutting-edge scientific topics accessible to everyone
• Explore novel methods of knowledge transfer
• Overcome the complexity of a multi-cultural and interdisciplinary learning context
• Bring global teaching to a new level

These lectures about Natural and Artificial Intelligence have been held via videoconference at the University Carlos III of Madrid in Spain, the University of Zurich in Switzerland, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna of Pisa, Italy, Humboldt University Berlin in Germany, University of Plymouth and University of Salford in the UK, and 10 other universities around the globe. Students from the participating universities are still working together on the exercises, using Webots by Cyberbotics, and Ludobots by the University of Vermont.

The lectures have also been streamed to allow remote participation to anybody.

The ShanghAI Lectures differ from ‘conventional’ MOOCs as they exploit telecommunication technology to build a global, distributed lecture hall that allows rich interaction rather than simply implementing the good old fashioned TV broadcasting model on a different medium. They also differ from other AI courses as they propose a new paradigm approach to embodied cognition (a.k.a. AI and Robotics). It is a kind of Copernican revolution with respect to GOFAI and its robotics application — and thus a research program for the coming decades.

This year I coordinated the lectures, with help from Prof. Rolf Pfeifer and Dr. Nathan Labhart at the University of Zurich . Rolf Pfeifer and I provided the context (introduction, moderation, and conclusion). As always, there were 2-3  invited guest lectures each week.

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2010-12-16

The design of cognitive situated robots able to learn to operate in the real world and to interact and communicate with humans, must model and reflectively reason about their perceptions and actions in order to learn, act, predict and react appropriately. Such capabilities can only be attained by embodied agents through physical interaction with and exploration of the real world and requires the simultaneous consideration of perception and action. Representations built from such interactions are much better adapted to guiding behaviour than human crafted rules and allow embodied agents to gradually extend their cognitive horizon.

In the first part of the talk, I present the concept of Object-Action Complexes (OAC, pronounced “oak”) which has been introduced by the European project PACO-PLUS (www.paco-plus.org) to emphasize the notion that objects and actions are inseparably intertwined and that categories are therefore determined (and also limited) by the action an agent can perform and by the attributes of the world it can perceive. Entities (things) in the world of a robot (or human) will only become semantically useful objects through the action that the agent can/will perform on them. The second part of the talk presents current results toward the implementation of integrated 24/7 humanoid robots able to 1) perform complex grasping and manipulation tasks in a kitchen environment 2) autonomously acquire object knowledge through visual and haptic exploration and 3) learn actions from human observation. The developed capabilities are demonstrated on the humanoid robots ARMAR-IIIa and ARMAR-IIIb.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJLzV418pF4

Slides

Tamim Asfour is senior research scientist and leader of the Humanoid Research Group at Humanoids and Intelligence Systems Lab, Institute for Anthropomatics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).

His major research interest is humanoid robotics. In particular, his research topics include action learning from human observation, goal-directed imitation learning, dexterous grasping and manipulation, active vision and active touch, whole-body motion planning, cognitive control architectures, system integration, robot software and hardware control architecture, motor control and mechatronics.

He is leading the system integration tasks and the development team of the humanoid robot series ARMAR in the German Humanoid Robotics Project (SFB 588) funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). He is currently involved in the following projects funded by the European Commission: PACO-PLUS, GRASP and Xperience.

Tamim Asfour is member of the Editorial Board of IEEE Transactions on Robotics and European Chair of the IEEE-RAS Technical Committee on Humanoid Robots. He is member the Executive Board of the German Association of Robotics (DGR: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Robotik). He serves as member on several program committees and review panels.

He received his diploma degree in Electrical Engineering (Dipl.-Ing.) in 1994 and his PhD in Computer Science (Dr.-Ing.) in 2003 from the University of Karlsruhe. In 2003 he was awarded with the Research Center for Information Technology (FZI) price for his outstanding Ph.D. thesis on sensorimotor control in humanoid robotics and the development of the humanoid robot ARMAR. Since September 2010 he holds an Adjunct Professor position at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), College of Computing, Interactive Computing.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence, run and organized by Rolf Pfeifer (from 2009 till 2012), Fabio Bonsignorio (since 2013), and me with partners around the world. 

The ShanghAI Lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

In this lecture, hosted at the University Carlos III of Madrid in Spain, I show how it is possible to ground ‘understanding’ on data streams coming from the physical interaction of an agent in the environment, and discuss the many open issues that remain. For example, setting information theory in an embodied framework is challenging, but the road ahead looks promising. So, what’s the link between locomotion to cognition? Is there one? Check out the lecture:

“Motor primitives and compositionality: From humans to the Octopus” by Tamar Flash

There is more to motion learning and planning in humans and animals than is usually thought. Some weird mathematics such as Lie algebras seem to shed some understanding on motion planning in animals (humans included), and could help toward the devlopment of robotics systems that are similar to natural embodied intelligent agents. Prof. Flash, from the Dept. of Applied Math. and Computer Science at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel does research on motor control in humans and robotic systems. Her current interest is in investigating the neural control of flexible hyper-redundant arms in the Octopus. Want to learn more? Have a look here:

Prof. Flash is from the Dept. of Applied Math. and Computer Science, The Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel.

Guest Lecture – “Autopoiesis” by Luisa Damiano

Philosopher Luisa Damiano, Associate Researcher in Philosophy of Science at the Research Center on Complex Systems (CERCO) of the University of Bergamo and founder of the Epistemology of the Sciences of the Artificial Research Group (ESARG), takes a critical look at ‘synthetical methodology’ and looks beyond the context of robotics AI/cognition to include ‘Autopoiesis’ – a concept introduced by Maturana and Varela in the epistemology of Life Sciences. Curious about ‘synthetic methodology’ outside robotics and cognition? Do you want to know what ‘Autopoiesis’ means? See here:

Guest Lecture – “The two souls of synthetic biology: Experimental approaches” by Luigi Luisi

What is a minimum set living system? Why are certain proteins used in natural living systems but not others? Couldn’t it just be by ‘contingency’? Professor Pier Luigi Luisi is a leading researcher in synthetic biology, and his latest book is called The Emergence of Life: From Chemical Origins to Synthetic Biology. He is currently writing a book with Fritjof Capra. Watch Luisi’s lecture:

About the ShanghAI Lectures

While in the classical approach “intelligence” was essentially viewed as information processing taking place in the brain, the more recent insight that interaction with the environment is of central importance is gaining acceptance. This has led to the metaphor of embodiment, i.e., that intelligence is always a property of an entire organism — an idea that has far-reaching implications and often leads to surprising insights, but which has not so far been widely exploited in industry practice.

The ShanghAI Lectures project aims to:

• Build a sustainable community of students and researchers in the area of Embodied Intelligence
• Make education and knowledge on cutting-edge scientific topics accessible to everyone
• Explore novel methods of knowledge transfer
• Overcome the complexity of a multi-cultural and interdisciplinary learning context
• Bring global teaching to a new level

These lectures about Natural and Artificial Intelligence have been held via videoconference at the University Carlos III of Madrid in Spain, the University of Zurich in Switzerland, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna of Pisa, Italy, Humboldt University Berlin in Germany, University of Plymouth and University of Salford in the UK, and 10 other universities around the globe. Students from the participating universities are still working together on the exercises, using Webots by Cyberbotics, and Ludobots by the University of Vermont.

The lectures have also been streamed to allow remote participation to anybody.

The ShanghAI Lectures differ from ‘conventional’ MOOCs as they exploit telecommunication technology to build a global, distributed lecture hall that allows rich interaction rather than simply implementing the good old fashioned TV broadcasting model on a different medium. They also differ from other AI courses as they propose a new paradigm approach to embodied cognition (a.k.a. AI and Robotics). It is a kind of Copernican revolution with respect to GOFAI and its robotics application — and thus a research program for the coming decades.

This year I coordinated the lectures, with help from Prof. Rolf Pfeifer and Dr. Nathan Labhart at the University of Zurich . Rolf Pfeifer and I provided the context (introduction, moderation, and conclusion). As always, there were 2-3  invited guest lectures each week.

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2010-12-02

Self-assembly is of crucial importance in the biological realm at all scales. This talk introduces a series of self-assembling robots developed in our project, and discusses key features that such robots are expected to possess. The robots give rise to unique insight into the interdependencies between the components’ morphology, systems’ stochasticity, and the emerged behaviors, and cast light on the design principle of self-assembling components. We believe that the research introduced deepens the practical understanding of the formation of spontaneous structure and function, firmly provides knowledge for the realization of scalable self-assembly systems, and will, ultimately brings us closer to answering the nature of “living” systems.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8mKmXQzDWg

Shuhei Miyashita received his masters degree in computational intelligence and systems science from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, his bachelor degree in electrical and electronics engineering from Jouchi University, and his PhD degree at the AI Lab, University of Zurich in Switzerland. He is a postdoctoral research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. His publications can be found at http://shuhei.net/.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence, run and organized by Rolf Pfeifer (from 2009 till 2012), Fabio Bonsignorio (since 2013), and me with partners around the world. 

The ShanghAI Lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

Lecture 7 – Design principles of intelligent systems

This lecture, which I hosted at the University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain, looks at the foundational issues and the successes and failures of AI from a critical perspective. It details the novel principles discussed in Rolf Pfeifer’s and Josh Bongard’s  book ‘How the body shapes the way we think’ , the importance of considering the full embodied agent, the necessity of self-organization, and questions more recent AI successes, such as IBM Watson.

“Making robots that really feel” by Kevin O’Regan

Prof. O’ Regan, former director of the Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, CNRS, Université Paris Descartes, in France, is a leading researcher on perception. He questioned established notions of the nature of visual perception and predicted, with collaborators, the phenomenon of “change blindness”. His current work involves exploring the empirical consequences of a new “sensorimotor” approach to vision and sensation in general.

In this talk he discusses the implications and perspectives of ‘phemomenal consciousness’. What colour is ‘red’? Why doesn’t red ‘sound like a bell’? Watch Kevin’s talk:

Guest Lecture – “Visual Servo Control of Cable-Driven Soft Robotic Manipulator” by Hesheng Wang

In previous talks we explored issues of designing  soft robot arm. In this talk Prof. Wang from the Autonomous Robot Lab at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University shows how to control them:

You may notice that the approach is fairly classic, and that we are still lacking the models to do it from a morphological computation and self-organization standpoint – although I and some of the other ShanghAI lecturers have some ideas about how to do this.

About the ShanghAI Lectures

While in the classical approach “intelligence” was essentially viewed as information processing taking place in the brain, the more recent insight that interaction with the environment is of central importance is gaining acceptance. This has led to the metaphor of embodiment, i.e., that intelligence is always a property of an entire organism — an idea that has far-reaching implications and often leads to surprising insights, but which has not so far been widely exploited in industry practice.

The ShanghAI Lectures project aims to:

• Build a sustainable community of students and researchers in the area of Embodied Intelligence
• Make education and knowledge on cutting-edge scientific topics accessible to everyone
• Explore novel methods of knowledge transfer
• Overcome the complexity of a multi-cultural and interdisciplinary learning context
• Bring global teaching to a new level

These lectures about Natural and Artificial Intelligence have been held via videoconference at the University Carlos III of Madrid in Spain, the University of Zurich in Switzerland, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna of Pisa, Italy, Humboldt University Berlin in Germany, University of Plymouth and University of Salford in the UK, and 10 other universities around the globe. Students from the participating universities are still working together on the exercises, using Webots by Cyberbotics, and Ludobots by the University of Vermont.

The lectures have also been streamed to allow remote participation to anybody.

The ShanghAI Lectures differ from ‘conventional’ MOOCs as they exploit telecommunication technology to build a global, distributed lecture hall that allows rich interaction rather than simply implementing the good old fashioned TV broadcasting model on a different medium. They also differ from other AI courses as they propose a new paradigm approach to embodied cognition (a.k.a. AI and Robotics). It is a kind of Copernican revolution with respect to GOFAI and its robotics application — and thus a research program for the coming decades.

This year I coordinated the lectures, with help from Prof. Rolf Pfeifer and Dr. Nathan Labhart at the University of Zurich . Rolf Pfeifer and I provided the context (introduction, moderation, and conclusion). As always, there were 2-3  invited guest lectures each week.

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2010-12-02

Collective systems play very important role on Earth, and we encounter them in all sizes, scales and forms; in biological and technological areas; in ocean, air and on the ground. Examples include viruses, different colloidal systems, nano- and micro-scale particles, huge world of social insects and animals; collective systems in robotics vary from nano- up to large space exploration robots. To some extent, collective systems are ubiquitous. Such a prevalence and diversity and can be explained by several unique properties: scalability, reliability, flexibility, self-developmental capabilities. This guest lecture introduces the area of collective robotics and answers the questions “what and why”. Special attention is given to reconfigurable robotics, we discuses a big vision of “universal modularity” and several ways of its achieving.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_V_3yN1ZrA

Serge Kernbach is the head of the collective robotics group at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. He graduated in electronic engineering and computer science in 1994. During 1996-1998 he received several research grants, in 2007 his doctoral thesis won the faculty-award as the best dissertation of the year. Since 2004 he has been a coordinator of several European research projects on the field of collective robotics. Serge’s main research interest is focused on artificial collective systems, he is the author and co-author of over 100 articles in international journals and conferences, edited a few books related to robotics. Since 2000 he acquired for IPVS more than 3.5 M€ in different research projects.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence, run and organized by Rolf Pfeifer (from 2009 till 2012), Fabio Bonsignorio (since 2013), and me with partners around the world. 

The ShanghAI Lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

In this second lecture hosted by the Scuola Superiore S. Anna, Matteo Cianchetti builds on the previous lecture to talk about building soft actuators for soft robots. In Matteo’s lecture, titled “Soft actuator design methods“,  he explains that the devil is in the details, but that it’s possible to build soft actuators by insightfully exploiting the properties of Shape Memory Alloy (SMA). Want to learn how?

Guest Lecture – “Can ‘Synthetic Methodology’ cause a paradigm shift?” by Minoru Asada

In this talk Prof. Minoru Asada from the University of Osaka, in Japan, shows the results and discusses the underlying principles of his research on developmental robotics and the of the psychological development of the basic human cognitive functions in the baby and even in the fetus! This is an iconic example of synthetic methodology application.

How can we simulate the development of a fetus, for example? And above all, can ‘Synthetic Methodology’ really cause a paradigm shift? Watch Asada’s  lecture here:

About the ShanghAI Lectures

While in the classical approach “intelligence” was essentially viewed as information processing taking place in the brain, the more recent insight that interaction with the environment is of central importance is gaining acceptance. This has led to the metaphor of embodiment, i.e., that intelligence is always a property of an entire organism — an idea that has far-reaching implications and often leads to surprising insights, but which has not so far been widely exploited in industry practice.

The ShanghAI Lectures project aims to:

• Build a sustainable community of students and researchers in the area of Embodied Intelligence
• Make education and knowledge on cutting-edge scientific topics accessible to everyone
• Explore novel methods of knowledge transfer
• Overcome the complexity of a multi-cultural and interdisciplinary learning context
• Bring global teaching to a new level

These lectures about Natural and Artificial Intelligence have been held via videoconference at the University Carlos III of Madrid in Spain, the University of Zurich in Switzerland, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna of Pisa, Italy, Humboldt University Berlin in Germany, University of Plymouth and University of Salford in the UK, and 10 other universities around the globe. Students from the participating universities are still working together on the exercises, using Webots by Cyberbotics, and Ludobots by the University of Vermont.

The lectures have also been streamed to allow remote participation to anybody.

The ShanghAI Lectures differ from ‘conventional’ MOOCs as they exploit telecommunication technology to build a global, distributed lecture hall that allows rich interaction rather than simply implementing the good old fashioned TV broadcasting model on a different medium. They also differ from other AI courses as they propose a new paradigm approach to embodied cognition (a.k.a. AI and Robotics). It is a kind of Copernican revolution with respect to GOFAI and its robotics application — and thus a research program for the coming decades.

This year I coordinated the lectures, with help from Prof. Rolf Pfeifer and Dr. Nathan Labhart at the University of Zurich . Rolf Pfeifer and I provided the context (introduction, moderation, and conclusion). As always, there were 2-3  invited guest lectures each week.

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2009-12-17

In the past decade, soccer robots have been developed greatly, and some of the robot soccer games have been showing more and more attractions. However, many open problems such as how to train soccer robots in the real world, and how the soccer robots learn the action skills incrementally or communicatively have been challenging us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nygqkdknA-I

In this talk, we will firstly introduce the motivations for our research. Then, some prospective approaches related with developmental learning of autonomous robots will be discussed. Also, we will propose some ideas and show some practical work for action skill developmental learning in autonomous mobile robots. At last, we will point out the potential advantages of developmental learning and the further research directions.

Xiaoan Li received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Information Engineering in 1987, Control Theory and Application in 1990, and Ph.D. degree in Computer Application Technology in 2000, respectively, all from the department of computer, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an city, China. Since 1997 he has been an associate professor. From May 2008 to May 2009, he was a visiting scholar in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Michigan State University. Dr. Li is the founder of the Soccer Robot team in Northwestern Polytechnical University, and the chief advisor from 2003 to 2009. His research interests include computational intelligence, learning and cooperation of multi-agent robot system, the real-time intelligent control.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence, run and organized by Rolf Pfeifer (from 2009 till 2012), Fabio Bonsignorio (since 2013), and me with partners around the world. 

The ShanghAI Lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

Hosted by Prof. Cecilia Laschi from the Scuola Superiore S. Anna in Pisa, Italy, this ShanghAI episode puts together contrasting approaches to ‘embodied intelligence’ and ‘embodied cognition’ in her lecture titled “How an octopus can help build a robot”.

Laschi, who among many other things has coordinated the European ‘Octopus’ project,  shows a radical approach to embodiment starting from the bottom-up, by taking us through the development of the physical soft structure of a robot octopus. Soft robotics has a lot to say about embodied cognition and morphological computation, and also involves several non-trivial engineering challenges. Can building an artificial octopus really help to advance robotics? Don’t miss Cecilia Laschi’s lecture:

Guest Lecture – “From scene segmentation to task based grasping” by Danica Kragic

In this talk Prof. Danica Kragic from the KTH in Stockolm, Sweden shows the benefits of embodiment to grasping – from a top-down approach based on computer vision, machine learning and AI. Kragic has led the Grasp european project, and is a leading researcher in the area of AI and robotics. Whatever DARPA tells you, the problem of grasping still isn’t solved. For example we still don’t have a robot that is able to take the dishes from a real world sink and put them into a dishwasher (this would be a killer application, do you agree?) How long will we have to wait?

A top-down approach to solving ‘real problems’ within the embodied approach to AI and robotics still has several basic research questions to answer. If you have been following the previous lectures you may have noticed that many researchers are approaching the issue of embodied cognition with sometimes very different methods and models, and a synthesis at the level of concrete mathematical models is still missing.

The good news is that we may be on right path. Find out what Kragic has to say on the matter:

Guest Lecture – “Hard Work for Robotics from Soft Actuators” by Bram Vanderborght

Soft robots need soft actuators, and building soft actuators is not a trivial task. Prof. Bram Vanderborght is with the Vrije University Brussels and does cutting-edge research on soft actuators, in particular in legged locomotion of humanoid robots. Dive into the modeling and engineering challenges and subtle solutions presented by Bram Vanderborght in his talk:

About the ShanghAI Lectures

While in the classical approach “intelligence” was essentially viewed as information processing taking place in the brain, the more recent insight that interaction with the environment is of central importance is gaining acceptance. This has led to the metaphor of embodiment, i.e., that intelligence is always a property of an entire organism — an idea that has far-reaching implications and often leads to surprising insights, but which has not so far been widely exploited in industry practice.

The ShanghAI Lectures project aims to:

• Build a sustainable community of students and researchers in the area of Embodied Intelligence
• Make education and knowledge on cutting-edge scientific topics accessible to everyone
• Explore novel methods of knowledge transfer
• Overcome the complexity of a multi-cultural and interdisciplinary learning context
• Bring global teaching to a new level

These lectures about Natural and Artificial Intelligence have been held via videoconference at the University Carlos III of Madrid in Spain, the University of Zurich in Switzerland, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna of Pisa, Italy, Humboldt University Berlin in Germany, University of Plymouth and University of Salford in the UK, and 10 other universities around the globe. Students from the participating universities are still working together on the exercises, using Webots by Cyberbotics, and Ludobots by the University of Vermont.

The lectures have also been streamed to allow remote participation to anybody.

The ShanghAI Lectures differ from ‘conventional’ MOOCs as they exploit telecommunication technology to build a global, distributed lecture hall that allows rich interaction rather than simply implementing the good old fashioned TV broadcasting model on a different medium. They also differ from other AI courses as they propose a new paradigm approach to embodied cognition (a.k.a. AI and Robotics). It is a kind of Copernican revolution with respect to GOFAI and its robotics application — and thus a research program for the coming decades.

This year I coordinated the lectures, with help from Prof. Rolf Pfeifer and Dr. Nathan Labhart at the University of Zurich . Rolf Pfeifer and I provided the context (introduction, moderation, and conclusion). As always, there were 2-3  invited guest lectures each week.

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2009-12-17

This lecture discusses the relevance of embedding dramatic scenarios and expressive language into methodologies employed in the research and development of biochemical and/or electronic sentient beings. The author demonstrates how adding imaginative modalities to current practices can afford a profound and positive effect on outcomes.

Please note that due to some technical problems, some videos in the recording come without audio. We apologize for the inconvenience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75nkH37FCi8

Adrianne Wortzel explores a range of new technologies as web works, robotic installations and performance productions. Her Globe Theater Repertory Company of robots were featured in installations in Cooper Union’s “Technoseduction” exhibition, Creative Time’s “Art in the Anchorage”; Ars Electronic, “Fleshfactor” and Kunstpflug e.V., Berlin “Arreale99”. She wrote, produced and designed “Sayonara Diorama”, a performance production with robots, live performers and responsive remote performances via videoconferencing, via an Artist-in-Residence Grant at Lehman College Art Gallery in New York funded by the Electronic Media and Film Program of the New York State Council on the Arts.

She has organized and produced international performative webcasts, and was co-host and content provider for “Art Dirt” a weekly live video-streamed interview format webcast originating from New York. She is a recipient of a 2000-2001 National Science Foundation grant awarded for creating a robotic theater at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art where she is currently working on her project ELIZA REDUX, a series of webcast and videotaped psychoanalytic sessions between a human and a robot.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence, run and organized by Rolf Pfeifer (from 2009 till 2012), Fabio Bonsignorio (since 2013), and me with partners around the world. 

The ShanghAI Lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

Lecture 4 – Evolution: Cognition from scratch

If you believe that it’s too difficult to develop the mathematical models required to arrive at a new concept of embodied AI and robotics, this lecture will offer you hope. In her talk, Prof. Verena Hafner, from Humboldt University in Berlin, discusses the concept of ‘body maps’ from an embodied intelligence perspective, and shows how they can emerge from sensorimotor flow, through information distances in the data flow and/or an internal simulation. In this context the ‘body map’ is not a symbolic ‘representation’ of the agent’s body, but rather an emerging structure used by the agent in its interaction with its environment.

“Creating body maps” by Verena Hafner

“Evolution: cognition from scratch” by Rolf Pfeifer

In the second talk, Rolf Pfeifer shows how evolutionary processes at different time scales drive the development of embodied intelligence in nature, and how they can be mimicked (with surprisingly good results) for the development of artificial systems, including … pipes and antennas!

How can we exploit Gene Regulatory Networks for the development of a new paradigm for robots?

Guest Lecture – “How can we test for artificial life? Complexity and computation in Nature” by Hector Zenil

An unlikely yellow ‘computer’?

The skeptics will think that certain concepts such as ‘life’ or ‘self-organization’ are too  elusive and ill-defined to be useful to AI. Hector Zeni, from the Karolinska Institute in Stockolm, Sweden, does cutting-edge research on the applications of Algorithmic Information Theory to the modeling of life and cognition. Witness how AIT might come to the rescue with this lecture, also hosted by Humboldt University Berlin …

About the ShanghAI Lectures

While in the classical approach “intelligence” was essentially viewed as information processing taking place in the brain, the more recent insight that interaction with the environment is of central importance is gaining acceptance. This has led to the metaphor of embodiment, i.e., that intelligence is always a property of an entire organism — an idea that has far-reaching implications and often leads to surprising insights, but which has not so far been widely exploited in industry practice.

The ShanghAI Lectures project aims to:

• Build a sustainable community of students and researchers in the area of Embodied Intelligence
• Make education and knowledge on cutting-edge scientific topics accessible to everyone
• Explore novel methods of knowledge transfer
• Overcome the complexity of a multi-cultural and interdisciplinary learning context
• Bring global teaching to a new level

These lectures about Natural and Artificial Intelligence have been held via videoconference at the University Carlos III of Madrid in Spain, the University of Zurich in Switzerland, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna of Pisa, Italy, Humboldt University Berlin in Germany, University of Plymouth and University of Salford in the UK, and 10 other universities around the globe. Students from the participating universities are still working together on the exercises, using Webots by Cyberbotics, and Ludobots by the University of Vermont.

The lectures have also been streamed to allow remote participation to anybody.

The ShanghAI Lectures differ from ‘conventional’ MOOCs as they exploit telecommunication technology to build a global, distributed lecture hall that allows rich interaction rather than simply implementing the good old fashioned TV broadcasting model on a different medium. They also differ from other AI courses as they propose a new paradigm approach to embodied cognition (a.k.a. AI and Robotics). It is a kind of Copernican revolution with respect to GOFAI and its robotics application — and thus a research program for the coming decades.

This year I coordinated the lectures, with help from Prof. Rolf Pfeifer and Dr. Nathan Labhart at the University of Zurich . Rolf Pfeifer and I provided the context (introduction, moderation, and conclusion). As always, there were 2-3  invited guest lectures each week.

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2009-12-17

In this guest lecture, Hiroshi Yokoi from University of Electro-Communication, Chofu, Japan, talks about prosthetic robot hands, EMG devices, bio-feedback, and the Japanese trends in Brain-Machine Interfaces.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence, run and organized by Rolf Pfeifer (from 2009 till 2012), Fabio Bonsignorio (since 2013), and me with partners around the world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sLB9ARwFNU

The ShanghAI Lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

Lecture 3 – Cognition and embodiment – Language learning in children and robots: A developmental robotics approach 

This week’s lecture discusses an important problem: how ‘symbols’ and language emerge and are ‘grounded’ from the flow of sensory-motor data. In this lecture, Angelo Cangelosi, Director of the Centre for Robotics and Neural Systems at the University of Plymouth, explains the developmental approach to robotics (and psychology) and offers a remarkable example of ‘synthetic methodology’  for the study of children’s intellectual development.  Cangelosi, who’s original background is in psychology, is a leading researcher in developmental robotics.

Do you want to know what ‘gavagai’ means? And why this is an important issue? Watch the video:

Notice the experiments on the emergence of natural number from sensory-motor data flow.  Aren’t they intriguing? Do you remember ‘Where mathematics come from?’ by Lakoff and Nuñez? You may also check Nuñez’ s lectures in the ShanghAI archive!

This year the ShanghAI Lectures have been more ‘distributed’ than they had been in the past. While Rolf and I have developed the main ideas for the embodied cognition approach to AI and Robotics following the approach described in ‘How the Body Shapes the Way We Think’, in our text book we have devoted significant space to describing overlapping perspectives of embodied cognition from different researchers. Some lectures have been ‘hosted’  sites other than Madrid or Zurich. This was the first lecture broadcast by the University of Plymouth.

Guest Lecture – “Does Robotics Really Need Embodiment?” by Vincent Mueller

What we usually refer to as ‘embodiment’ is not the trivial concept that ‘intelligence needs a body’. The epistemological problems raised by the ‘embodiment’ and the ‘synthetic methodology’ approaches are not trivial either. In this talk, Vincent Mueller plays the devil’s advocate:

Vincent Mueller is a philosopher with the Anatolia College Thessaloniki and the University of Oxford. He is the coordinator of euCogIII, the largest and most important European network cognition science researchers. With almost 1000 members, euCogIII spans many disciplines, including AI, neuroscience and philosophy.

Guest Lecture – “Morphological Computation and Soft Robotics” by Helmut Hauser

A central aspect of ’embodied intelligence’ or ’embodied cognition’ is the the fact that part of the ‘control’ is offloaded to the physical dynamics of the agent, in what is called  ‘morphological computation’. In order to exploit morphological computation in the development of artificial cognitive agents, and to better understand its role in natural intelligence, quantitative models are needed. In this lecture  Helmut Hauser proposes a possible model, and also shows how issues related to morphological computation are intertwined with soft robot modeling.

Helmut Hauser is with the AI Lab of the University of Zurich and is one of the few people who dares to look for quantitative models of morphological computation (another one is …myself :-)).

About the ShanghAI Lectures

While in the classical approach “intelligence” was essentially viewed as information processing taking place in the brain, the more recent insight that interaction with the environment is of central importance is gaining acceptance. This has led to the metaphor of embodiment, i.e., that intelligence is always a property of an entire organism — an idea that has far-reaching implications and often leads to surprising insights, but which has not so far been widely exploited in industry practice.

The ShanghAI Lectures project aims to:

• Build a sustainable community of students and researchers in the area of Embodied Intelligence
• Make education and knowledge on cutting-edge scientific topics accessible to everyone
• Explore novel methods of knowledge transfer
• Overcome the complexity of a multi-cultural and interdisciplinary learning context
• Bring global teaching to a new level

These lectures about Natural and Artificial Intelligence have been held via videoconference at the University Carlos III of Madrid in Spain, the University of Zurich in Switzerland, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna of Pisa, Italy, Humboldt University Berlin in Germany, University of Plymouth and University of Salford in the UK, and 10 other universities around the globe. Students from the participating universities are still working together on the exercises, using Webots by Cyberbotics, and Ludobots by the University of Vermont.

The lectures have also been streamed to allow remote participation to anybody.

The ShanghAI Lectures differ from ‘conventional’ MOOCs as they exploit telecommunication technology to build a global, distributed lecture hall that allows rich interaction rather than simply implementing the good old fashioned TV broadcasting model on a different medium. They also differ from other AI courses as they propose a new paradigm approach to embodied cognition (a.k.a. AI and Robotics). It is a kind of Copernican revolution with respect to GOFAI and its robotics application — and thus a research program for the coming decades.

This year I coordinated the lectures, with help from Prof. Rolf Pfeifer and Dr. Nathan Labhart at the University of Zurich . Rolf Pfeifer and I provided the context (introduction, moderation, and conclusion). As always, there were 2-3  invited guest lectures each week.

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2009-12-17

In this guest lecture, Wenwei Yu from Chiba University, Japan, introduces his approach to assistive technology and talks about (simulation) experiments in human walking and reflexive responses.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence, run and organized by Rolf Pfeifer (from 2009 till 2012), Fabio Bonsignorio (since 2013), and me with partners around the world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvLVPmBgWUo

The ShanghAI lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2009-12-10

Recognition has been a subject of intense research interest to computer vision, AI, cognitive science, as well as robotics communities for, at least, several decades. As a result, a rich list of research outcomes on computer based recognition and understanding of symbols, objects, faces, gestures, as well as scenes are available to date in the form of publications, open source libraries, as well as commercial products. One of the major issues in recognition, especially in 2D recognition, has been how to deal with variations due to illumination, perspective, distance, texture as well as occlusion. Conventional approaches to engineering solution include the development of photometric and geometric features invariant to such variations and the efficient organization of visual memory for appearance/view based matching. Despite much success in recognition, the conventional approaches as described above are turned out to be inadequate for dealing with recognition involved in robotic services such as errand, home maid, etc., services in real-world environments. This is due to the fact that the environmental variations service robots must deal with are often beyond what conventional approaches can handle and, furthermore, the preconditions for recognition, such as the target being in the proper sight of and distance from camera in the first place, may not necessarily be met when recognition is ordered. It is apparent that recognition for service robots should extend its scope beyond conventional matching and classification toward more human-like capability under the framework of cognitive vision or cognitive recognition. In this lecture, I will introduce what constitutes cognitive recognition: namely, 1) bottom-up and top-down based saliency detection for implementing focus of attention as a means of efficient yet weak initial recognition step, 2) integration with knowledge to make best use of recognition context, 3) probabilistic evidence fusion for reaching reliable decision, 4) proactive collection of evidences for better decision, 5) cognitive engine where recognition is processed as a self-defined mission.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence, run and organized by Rolf Pfeifer (from 2009 till 2012), Fabio Bonsignorio (since 2013), and me with partners around the world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-oHUbwprLc

Sukhan Lee received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering, Seoul National University, 1974 and 1972, respectively, and Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, 1982. From 1983 to 1997, he was a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at University of Southern California, and also a Senior Member of Technical Staff for Intelligent Robot R&D Programs, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA and California Institute of Technology from 1990 to 1997. From 1998 to 2003, he was an Executive Vice President and Chief Research Officer of MEMS, Nano Systems and Intelligent Systems Programs and Breakthrough Research Team, Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology. Since 2003 he has been a professor and director of the School of Information and Communication Engineering and Intelligent Systems Research, respectively. Prof. Sukhan Lee has his research interest in the areas of Cognitive Robotics, Intelligent Systems, and Micro/Nano Electro-Mechanical systems.

The ShanghAI lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

This week we publish the second of the

Lecture 2 – Embodied Intelligence

“Evolution embodies information in every part of every organism. … This information doesn’t have to be copied into the brain at all. It doesn’t have to be “represented” in “data structures” in the nervous system. It can be exploited by the nervous system, however, which is designed to rely on, or exploit, the information in the hormonal systems just as it is designed to rely on, or exploit, the information embodied in your limbs and eyes.” – D.Dennett, Kind of Minds, 1996

 

Many people will probably agree with Dennett from a philosophical standpoint, but what are the implications for robotics research and robot development?

There are many: What is the Frame-of-Reference problem? How we can get rid of it in principle? How can we get rid of it in practice?

Unfortunately,  the real world doesn’t come with labels. How can we associate symbols with a continuous stream of sensory stimulation? What is the cognitive role of physical interaction of the agent with the world? Check Rolf’s lecture to inspire your thoughts.

Guest Lecture – “From Bio-Inspired to Institutional-Inspired Collective Robotics” by Pedro Lima

The implications of the embodied intelligence paradigm are wide and deep.

In this talk Pedro Lima, from the Instituto Superior Tecnico in Lisbon, Portugal, shows how  human institutions can be seen as emerging processes in swarms of embodied intelligent agents, a.k.a. ‘robots’. This view has some implication on the economic sciences, too. In Portugal they are sensitive to ‘economics paradigms’ and know that current ones have some flaws :-). On the other hand an ‘institutional-inspired’ approach seems quite beneficial also for network robot development.

Intriguing, right? Watch the full lecture here:

Pedro Lima, is a professor at IST and a leading researcher in robotics and AI, and above all he is a nice guy and a subtle and deep thinker!

About the ShanghAI Lectures

While in the classical approach “intelligence” was essentially viewed as information processing taking place in the brain, the more recent insight that interaction with the environment is of central importance is gaining acceptance. This has led to the metaphor of embodiment, i.e., that intelligence is always a property of an entire organism — an idea that has far-reaching implications and often leads to surprising insights, but which has not so far been widely exploited in industry practice.

The ShanghAI Lectures project aims to:

• Build a sustainable community of students and researchers in the area of Embodied Intelligence
• Make education and knowledge on cutting-edge scientific topics accessible to everyone
• Explore novel methods of knowledge transfer
• Overcome the complexity of a multi-cultural and interdisciplinary learning context
• Bring global teaching to a new level

These lectures about Natural and Artificial Intelligence have been held via videoconference at the University Carlos III of Madrid in Spain, the University of Zurich in Switzerland, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna of Pisa, Italy, Humboldt University Berlin in Germany, University of Plymouth and University of Salford in the UK, and 10 other universities around the globe. Students from the participating universities are still working together on the exercises, using Webots by Cyberbotics, and Ludobots by the University of Vermont.

The lectures have also been streamed to allow remote participation to anybody.

The ShanghAI Lectures differ from ‘conventional’ MOOCs as they exploit telecommunication technology to build a global, distributed lecture hall that allows rich interaction rather than simply implementing the good old fashioned TV broadcasting model on a different medium. They also differ from other AI courses as they propose a new paradigm approach to embodied cognition (a.k.a. AI and Robotics). It is a kind of Copernican revolution with respect to GOFAI and its robotics application — and thus a research program for the coming decades.

This year I coordinated the lectures, with help from Prof. Rolf Pfeifer and Dr. Nathan Labhart at the University of Zurich . Rolf Pfeifer and I provided the context (introduction, moderation, and conclusion). As always, there were 2-3  invited guest lectures each week.

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2009-12-10

The success of the human species critically depends on our extraordinary ability to engage in joint action. Our perceptions, decisions and behaviour are tuned to those of others with whom we share beliefs, intentions and goals and thus form a group. These insights underlie the motivation of the JAST project, from which this presentation shows results. One of these results was the development of a robot that is able to joint-actly work together with a human on a collaborative assembly task.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence, run and organized by Rolf Pfeifer (from 2009 till 2012), Fabio Bonsignorio (since 2013), and me with partners around the world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSI2e73AoBM

Alois C. Knoll received the diploma (M.Sc.) degree in Electrical/Communications Engineering from the University of Stuttgart, Germany,in 1985 and his Ph.D. (summa cum laude) in computer science from the Technical University of Berlin, Germany, in 1988. He served on the faculty of the computer science department of TU Berlin until 1993, when he qualified for teaching computer science at a university (habilitation). He then joined the Technical Faculty of the University of Bielefeld, where he was a full professor and the director of the research group Technical Informatics until 2001. Between May 2001 and April 2004 he was a member of the board of directors of the Fraunhofer-Institute for Autonomous Intelligent Systems. At AIS he was head of the research group “Robotics Construction Kits”, dedicated to research and development in the area of educational robotics. Since autumn 2001 he has been a professor of Computer Science at the Computer Science Department of the Technische Universität München. He is also on the board of directors of the Central Institute of Medical Technology at TUM (IMETUM-Garching); between April 2004 and March 2006 he was Executive Director of the Institute of Computer Science at TUM.

His research interests include cognitive, medical and sensor-based robotics, multi-agent systems, data fusion, adaptive systems and multimedia information retrieval. In these fields he has published over 200 technical papers and guest-edited international journals. He has participated (and has coordinated) several large scale national collaborative research projects (funded by the EU, the DFG, the DAAD, the state of North-Rhine-Westphalia). He initiated and was the program chairman of the First IEEE/RAS Conference on Humanoid Robots (IEEE-RAS/RSJ Humanoids2000), he was general chair of IEEE Humanoids2003 and general chair of Robotik 2004, the largest German conference on robotics, and he served on several other organising committees. Prof. Knoll is a member of the German Society for Computer Science (Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI)) and the IEEE.

The ShanghAI lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

This week marks the launch of the ShanghAI Lectures 2013 Edition on Robohub — we will release a new lecture from this series every Monday until the series is complete. Please use the comments section below to send us your questions, and we will do our best to respond! You can learn more about the ShanghAI lectures here.

Lecture 1 – Intelligence: Things can be seen differently

If you are not interested in precisely predicting the motion of a handful of ‘anomalous’ stars (nowadays known as planets), then there is no reason to assume that the earth is not sitting at the center of the universe. Ptolemaic astronomy was good astronomy, after all. And if you were an astronomer of the XVI century you may have had good reason to think that ‘solving astronomy’ was simply a matter of adding the ‘right’ epicycles ;-). Many did. Why worry about just five stars that do not model correctly when there are several thousand stars that are perfectly predictable?

AI and Robotics have been very successful in the past fifty years, thanks to Google, IBM Watson, SIRI or Da Vinci, Opportunity, Bosto … oops Google again ;-). Yet something is still missing …

With all the due ‘caveats’, the first lecture of the 2013 ShanghAI series insinuates the doubt that we might be in a similar situation as regards AI and Robotics … that a paradigm change might be necessary in order to be able to build ‘real’ robots that are more similar to those dreamed by Hollywood, and that this new paradigm should be more similar to the massively multi-agent, self organizing, biological processes, exploiting ‘morphological computation’ than to the Good Old Fashioned top down ‘Cartesian’ paradigm, maybe with some machine learning in addition (modern ‘epicycles’?).

Are you intrigued? Do you wildly disagree? Check out the first lecture and learn about all the 2013 participants in the 2013 inaugural lecture:

About the ShanghAI Lectures

While in the classical approach “intelligence” was essentially viewed as information processing taking place in the brain, the more recent insight that interaction with the environment is of central importance is gaining acceptance. This has led to the metaphor of embodiment, i.e., that intelligence is always a property of an entire organism — an idea that has far-reaching implications and often leads to surprising insights, but which has not so far been widely exploited in industry practice.

The ShanghAI Lectures project aims to:

• Build a sustainable community of students and researchers in the area of Embodied Intelligence
• Make education and knowledge on cutting-edge scientific topics accessible to everyone
• Explore novel methods of knowledge transfer
• Overcome the complexity of a multi-cultural and interdisciplinary learning context
• Bring global teaching to a new level

These lectures about Natural and Artificial Intelligence have been held via videoconference at the University Carlos III of Madrid in Spain, the University of Zurich in Switzerland, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna of Pisa, Italy, Humboldt University Berlin in Germany, University of Plymouth and University of Salford in the UK, and 10 other universities around the globe. Students from the participating universities are still working together on the exercises, using Webots by Cyberbotics, and Ludobots by the University of Vermont.

The lectures have also been streamed to allow remote participation to anybody.

The ShanghAI Lectures differ from ‘conventional’ MOOCs as they exploit telecommunication technology to build a global, distributed lecture hall that allows rich interaction rather than simply implementing the good old fashioned TV broadcasting model on a different medium. They also differ from other AI courses as they propose a new paradigm approach to embodied cognition (a.k.a. AI and Robotics). It is a kind of Copernican revolution with respect to GOFAI and its robotics application — and thus a research program for the coming decades.

This year I coordinated the lectures, with help from Prof. Rolf Pfeifer and Dr. Nathan Labhart at the University of Zurich . Rolf Pfeifer and I provided the context (introduction, moderation, and conclusion). As always, there were 2-3  invited guest lectures each week.

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2009-12-03

Among the evolutionary algorithms, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) represents an optimization method where individuals, called particles, collaborate as a swarm to reach a collective goal. However, the usual logical decision processes used in the literature to model individual agent behaviour are generally found to be inadequate when the phenomena of uncertainty and risk are factored into the evolutionary process; and also incapable of fully emulating actual human decision-making behaviours under risk and uncertainty.

In this talk, I will propose a significant modification to agent reasoning processes employed so far in conventional Swarm Intelligence Techniques. I will show that endowing each particle with a non-rational behaviour, in the sense of Prospect Theory, can improve considerably the efficiency of global searching procedures. The results of this proposed technique is illustrated by numerical results obtained from applications to classical problems quoted in the literature.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence, run and organized by Rolf Pfeifer (from 2009 till 2012), Fabio Bonsignorio (since 2013), and me with partners around the world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML_MytzonS8

Dr Samia Nefti is Associate Professor Reader in Computational Intelligence at University of Salford and head of Computational Intelligence and Robotics Research Group. She is a leading expert internationally in artificial intelligence and her research interests over the last 19 years are concerned with the development of cognitive models for information processing and decision support systems for complex and non-linear systems and fuzzy optimasation and clustering. Dr Nefti has published and edited extensively in the above areas, which appeared in leading academic journals. She has also organized many international and national conference and workshop. She has been involved and led national (EPSRC, TSB) and European (FP5, FP6) multi-disciplinary research projects. She is a Chartered member of BCS and active member of the European Network for the Advancement of Artificial Cognitive Systems and Vice-President of IEEE UKRI Chapter in Robotics and Automation.

The ShanghAI lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2009-12-03

In this talk Professor Lueg will discuss how embodiment and scaffolding perspectives discussed in the ShanghAI Lectures on Natural and Artificial Intelligence can also be used to look at, and re-interpret, research topics in human computer interaction ranging from human information behavior in the real world to information interaction in online communities. In his work Professor Lueg understands human computer interaction as interaction with pretty much any kind of computer-based system ranging from desktop computers and mobile phones to microwave ovens and parking meters.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auOMNiYj-FM

Dr. sc.nat. Christopher Lueg is Professor of Computing at the University of Tasmania (Australia) where he established the ‘Information and Interaction’ research group. He was also a Research Fellow of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) for 2009-2012. Christopher’s research interests tend to manifest at the intersection of computer science, information science and cognitive science. He is teaching and researching in areas including human-computer interaction (HCI), computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), ubiquitous computing and context awareness, human information behavior and online communities. He edited (with Danyel Fisher, Microsoft Research) the book ‘From Usenet to CoWebs: Interacting with Social Information Spaces’ published by Springer in the CSCW series. His research students made him drink a Funky Monkey at Oomph.

The ShanghAI lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpVU84UpVFA

Weidong Chen received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Control Engineering in 1990 and 1993, and Ph.D. degree in Mechatronics in 1996, respectively, all from the Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China. Since 2005 he has been a professor of the Department of Automation at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China, and director of the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Processing. From 2003 to 2004, he was a visiting associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The Ohio State University. Dr. Chen’s research interests include autonomous mobile robot, multi-robot cooperation, and micro manipulation.

The ShanghAI lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2009-11-19

In this guest lecture, Eugen Elmiger from maxon motor ag, Sachseln, Switzerland, gives an overview of the precision motors his company produces, and shows how they are used in robotics and other areas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4Q_srUcSvs

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.

The ShanghAI lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

In the next coming weeks we will release all the lectures of the 2013 Edition, including remarks and insights. Don’t miss them!

Watch Thursday’s live stream here …

https://arcamm.uc3m.es/arcamm/uc3mtv/directo.php?ID=16

Agenda (all times in CET)

December 19th 2013
Lecture 10 : Future Trends
09:30 Fabio Bonsignorio: Welcome and introduction
09:35 Rolf Pfeifer:
How the body shapes the way we think – principles and insights
10:25 Manuela Veloso: Autonomous Service Robots that Can Ask for Help
11:00 Break
11:10 Panel: W.Chen, V.Mueller, R.Pfeifer, M.Veloso, V.Zabotkina
11:10 Panel: Q1: Does AI need embodiment?
11:40 Panel: Q2: The future of the ShanghAI lectures and education on natural and artificial intelligence
12:10 Good  bye! See you in 2014!

About the ShanghAI Lectures

While in the classical approach “intelligence” was essentially viewed as information processing taking place in the brain, the more recent insight that interaction with the environment is of central importance is gaining acceptance. This has led to the metaphor of embodiment, i.e., that intelligence is always a property of an entire organism — an idea that has far-reaching implications and often leads to surprising insights, but which has not so far been widely exploited in industry practice.

This year I coordinated the lectures, with a remarkable help from Prof. Rolf Pfeifer and Dr. Nathan Labhart at the University of Zurich . Me and Rolf Pfeifer will provide the context (introduction, moderation, and conclusion). As always, there are 2-3  invited guest lectures each week.

The 2013 edition presented guest lectures by some of the frontier researchers on natural and artificial intelligence, including a glimpse at artificial and synthetic life:

• Minoru Asada (Osaka University)
• Josh Bongard (University of Vermont)
• Angelo Cangelosi (Universty of Plymouth)
• Luisa Damiano (University of Bergamo)
• Tamar Flash (Weizmann Institute)
• Helmut Hauser (University of Zurich)
• Danica Kragic (KTH)
• Yasuo Kuniyoshi (University of Tokyo)
• Pedro Lima (IST Lisbon)
• Luigi Luisi (Roma Tre University)
• Giorgio Metta (IIT)
• Vincent Mueller (Anatolia College and Oxford University)
• Kevin O’Regan (Paris Descartes/CNRS/ENS)
• Bram Vanderborght (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
• Manuela Veloso (CMU)
• Hector Zenil (Karolinska Institutet)

The ShanghAI Lectures project aims to:

• Build a sustainable community of students and researchers in the area of Embodied Intelligence
• Make education and knowledge on cutting-edge scientific topics accessible to everyone
• Explore novel methods of knowledge transfer
• Overcome the complexity of a multi-cultural and interdisciplinary learning context
• Bring global teaching to a new level

These lectures about Natural and Artificial Intelligence are held via videoconference at the University Carlos III of Madrid in Spain, the University of Zurich in Switzerland, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna of Pisa, Italy, Humboldt University Berlin in Germany, University of Plymouth and University of Salford in the UK, and 10 other universities around the globe. Students from the participating universities work together on the exercises, using Webots by Cyberbotics, and Ludobots by the University of Vermont.

They differ from ‘conventional’ MOOCs as they exploit telecommunication technology to build a global lecture hall that allows rich interaction rather than simply implementing the good old fashioned TV broadcasting model on a different medium. They also differ from other AI courses as they propose a new paradigm approach to embodied cognition (a.k.a. AI and Robotics). It is a kind of Copernican revolution with respect to GOFAI and its robotics application — and thus a research program for the coming decades.

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2009-11-19

If the body plays a central role in intelligence, as a roboticist, how do we choose an appropriate body for our robot? Evolutionary robotics allows us to automatically optimize the physical layout of our robots as we also optimize their controllers. In this talk I will demonstrate how selecting or evolving an appropriate robot body can (1) simplify control, (2) make seemingly difficult tasks easier, (3) increase evolvability, (4) provide new behaviors, (5) facilitate the extraction of information from the environment, (6) generate new research questions, and (7) improve scalability.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2B0oJyBfF8

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.

The ShanghAI lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2009-11-12

If we try to describe any kinds of robot by mathematical models, they must be very complicated equations. Even, such robotic systems are categorized as a conventional dynamic system consist of positive definite inertia matrix, Coriolis’ force term, friction term, gravity term and so on, we cannot derive any authentic control scheme from such complicated nonlinear systems.

Of course, we can make a servo system for a joint control but we do not have any systematic control scheme for whole robots.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-n6meJXyQo

Hisato Kobayashi was born in Japan 1951. He graduated from Waseda University, he received both master degree and doctoral degree in electrical engineering from Waseda University in 1975 and 1978 respectively. During 1977-1982, he was a research associate of Tokyo University Agriculture and Technology. He joined Hosei University in 1982. He spent almost one year at Stuttgart University Germany 1988-1989 as an invited visiting researcher of Alexander Humboldt Foundatiion. He is now professor of Hosei University Tokyo, department of art and technology，he was president of Hosei University Research Institute, California. During 1998-2001, he was a visiting scholar of Stanford University and doing a joint project entitled “Sleep Smart Project.” He was Editor in Chief of Advanced Robotics, which was issued by Robotics Society in Japan and published by Brill Publisher in Holland. He was elected as fellow of IEEE in 2002. His research interests cover control theory, mechatronics systems, robotics and health care systems.

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.

The ShanghAI lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2009-11-12

“It has increasingly been realized that some of the key characteristics underlying real-world complex dynamical systems (such as economical, financial and ecological systems) can only been modelled and thus understood and predicted at qualitative level directly.However, lacking a coherent and arithmetically sound theoretical framework for modeling and analyzing such systems entirely at qualitative level has long been an obstacle to such a qualitative modeling endeavor. Our research work led to a novel qualitative theory that provides a solution to overcome this obstacle. We develop a ternary qualitative algebra and related arithmetic operations directly over a qualitative space and use this algebra as the basis to build a direct qualitative modeling approach with qualitative functions without falling back to quantitative details inherent in most existing approaches. One of the important results of our proposed modeling theory is that any qualitative system can be represented as a piecewise linear qualitative function. This result lays a theoretical foundation for piecewise linear qualitative function structure to serve as a normal form for representing arbitrary qualitative functions. This short lecture will provide a non-technical description of our qualitative modeling techniques and demonstrate its usefulness in modeling, thus analyzing, complex real-world systems such as financial and economical systems.”

Professor Shaohua Tan received his Ph.D in Electrical Engineering from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium in 1987. He has been Professor in Center for Information Science, Peking University, for 13 years. He held various teaching and research positions in a number of countries prior to joining Peking University. His research interests include developing qualitative modeling techniques in modeling complex real-world systems and analysis of financial systems using AI techniques.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZjyoo0Y1Js

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.

The ShanghAI lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2009-11-05

Animals and Humans utilize their compliance: muscular system and soft skin. The compliance plays an important role to exhibit intelligent behavior. To build an intelligent artificial agent, therefore, soft material is crucial. In the lecture, I will talk about several robots consisting of soft material for adaptive behavior. They are viewed from the design principles: cheap design, material property and redundancy.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVKUcgOc7Pg

Koh Hosoda received the Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering from Kyoto University, Japan in 1993. From 1993 to 1997, he was an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering for Computer-Controlled Machinery, Osaka University. From 1997 to 2010 he was an Associate Professor of the Department of Adaptive Machine Systems, Osaka University. From 2005 to 2010, he was a group leader of the JST Asada ERATO Project, as well. From Apr 2010, he has been a Professor of the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Osaka University. He stayed at AI laboratory, Zurich as a guest professor through Apr 1998 to Mar 1999.

The ShanghAI lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

Here are the slides of my keynote at last week’s excellent EUCog meeting: Social and Ethical Aspects of Cognitive Systems. And the talk itself is here, on YouTube.

The talk was in three parts.

Part 1: here I outline why and how roboticists must be ethical. This is essentially a recap of previous talks. I start with the societal context: the frustrating reality that even when we meet to discuss robot ethics this can be misinterpreted as scientists fear a revolt of killer robots. This kind of media reaction is just one part of three linked expectation gaps, in what I characterise as a crisis of expectations. I then outline a few ethical problems in robotics – just as examples. Here I argue it’s important to link safe and ethical behaviour – something that I return to later. Then I recap the five draft principles of robotics.

Part 2: here I ask the question: what if we could make ethical robots? I outline new thinking which brings together the idea of robots with internal models, with Dennett’s Tower of Generate and Test, as a way of making robots that can predict the consequences of their own actions. I then outline a generic control architecture for robot safety, even in unpredictable environments. The important thing about this approach is that the robot can generate next possible actions, test them in its internal model, and evaluate the safety consequences of each possible action. The unsafe actions are then inhibited – and the robot controller determines which of the remaining safe actions is chosen, using its usual action-selection mechanism. Then I argue that it is surprisingly easy to extend this architecture for ethical behaviour, to allow the robot to predict the robot actions that would minimise harm for a human in its environment. This appears to represent an implementation of Asimov’s 1st and 3rd laws. I outline the significant technical challenges that would need to be overcome to make this work.

But, assuming such a robot could be built, how ethical would it be? I suggest that with a subset of Asimovian ethics it probably wouldn’t satisfy an ethicist or moral philosopher. But, nevertheless – I argue there’s a good chance that such a minimally ethical robot could help to increase trust, in the robot, from its users.

Part 3: in the final part of the talk I conclude with some ethical questions. The first is: if we could build an ethical robot, are we ethically compelled to do so? Some argue that we have an ethical duty to try and build moral machines. I agree. But the counter argument, my second ethical question, is are there ethical hazards? Are we opening a kind of ethical Pandora’s box, by building robots that might have an implicit claim to rights, or responsibilities. I don’t mean that such a robot would ask for rights, but instead that, because it is has some moral agency, then we might think it should be accorded rights. I conclude that we should try and build ethical robots. The benefits I think far outweigh any ethical hazards, which in any event can, I think, be minimised.

*It was not so much an epiphany, as a slow conversion from sceptic to believer. I have long term collaborator Michael Fisher to thank for doggedly arguing with me that it was worth thinking deeply about how to build ethical robots.

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2009-11-05

In this guest lecture, SAYA, the robotic teacher from Japan, introduces herself and talks about the Tokyo University of Science, where she was constructed by Hiroshi Kobayashi.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2E8NUPmMUA

The ShanghAI lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!