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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Swarm intelligence of mobile robots is defined as a mobile robot network with only local interactions and finite sensing capabilities which however could achieve global objectives and collective behaviors. The most well-known examples of swarm intelligence in nature are discovered in the collective behaviors of ant and bee colonies. Self-healing is one of the most important components in swarm intelligence.