August 26, 2015 Wednesday - 09:30-10:30
Dr. Bischoff is Head of KUKA's Corporate Research department responsible for research and technology development preceding product development. Dr. Bischoff received his "Doktor-Ingenieur" degree from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology for his contributions towards the development of personal robots. He serves as Vice-President Industry of euRobotics AISBL - the European Robotics Association he helped to create to unite European roboticists and to engage in a public-private partnership with the European Commission. For leadership and outstanding contributions to the cooperation of academia and industry, and for managing and promoting significant technology transfer in the area of industrial and service robotics he was granted the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career Award in 2012.
The talk will give insight in how KUKA maintains its leadership in industrial and professional service robotics technology and innovation through collaboration with research institutes and academia. Particular focus will be given to control technologies developed for safe human-robot collaboration with the KUKA lightweight robot LBR iiwa and the mobile manipulator KUKA omniRob. The LBR iiwa redefines the possibilities for industrial robotics. For the first time, human and robot can work together safely without fences on highly sensitive tasks in close collaboration. Second, the KUKA omniRob, an omnidirectional mobile manipulator, will be presented. It currently serves as technology demonstrator and integration platform in many development projects and is at the edge of becoming a cornerstone for the factory of the future, in which shorter response times and greater flexibility going beyond full automation are required. The omniRob's extended working range and autonomy functions open up a wide range of options for entirely new production concepts. Both the LBR iiwa and the omniRob will be key enablers for the upcoming fourth industrial revolution.
August 27, 2015 Thursday - 09:00-10:00
Luis Paulo Reis is an Associate Professor at the University of Minho in Portugal and member of the Directive Board of LIACC - Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science Laboratory where he coordinates the Human-Machine Intelligent Cooperation Research Group. He received his Electrical Engineering BSc and MSc degrees from the University of Porto in 1993 and 1995, and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence/Robotics at the same University in 2003. During the last 20 years he has lectured courses on Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Robotics, Simulation and Modelling and Computer Programming. He was principal investigator of more than 10 research projects in those areas including FC Portugal, three times World Champion and eight times European Champion of Robotic Soccer at RoboCup. He also won more than 40 other scientific awards. He supervised 15 PhD and 85 MSc theses to completion and is currently supervising 8 PhD theses. He is the author of more than 300 publications in international conferences and journals.
In the future, humans and robots will have to work together in complex environments, to solve difficult problems and perform hard tasks, as a team. Thus, methodologies to enable robot-robot and human-robot cooperation and methodologies to enable robots to learn from their human counterparts are needed in order to allow this joint work. This talk will be focused on methodologies developed for creating multi-robot and human-robot heterogeneous teams with emphasis on the cooperation, interaction, control and learning methodologies developed on our projects: FC Portugal, HearBo and Intellwheels. FC Portugal project developed methodologies for creating heterogeneous robotic soccer teams capable of following human/robot coach high-level advice using concepts such as strategy, tactics, formations and setplays. The project also developed methodologies for multi-robot humanoid skills' learning that enabled us to learn complex skills such as walking, kicking, getting up or passing/receiving a ball. The project enabled our research groups to win 4 World and 10 European robotic soccer championships of distinct leagues/competitions, including simulation 2d, simulation 3d (humanoids), coach, rescue simulation, small-size and middle-size leagues. At HearBo, together with Honda-RI Japan we developed human robot interaction methodologies enabling advanced interaction while the robots dance to the beat. Finally, Intellwheels project developed the concept of Intelligent wheelchair with flexible human-robot interface, enabling the user to create his own multimodal interaction language that may be learned from scratch and refined using the human-robot interaction information. The talk will be illustrated with videos, results and examples from these three projects.
August 28, 2015 Friday - 09:00-10:00
The trends of robotics changes as service robots gain more ground and become part of our daily lives. Service or social robots have to function in less controlled and more dynamically changing environments than industrial robots, and the users of social robots are generally less technologically literate than the users of industrial robots, therefore social robots have to be able to interact naturally with humans and to fit in the human social environment. Social robotics faces new challenges that require an interdisciplinary approach. In contrast to previous approaches where the communication and behaviour of social robots were based on human-human interactions, ethorobotics offer a new direction. Today robotics is not advanced enough to reach the physical and cognitive capabilities of humans thus human-animal interaction can serve as a better model for designing the behaviour of social robots. Human-dog relationship is a good example for this paradigm as dogs have similar roles as social robots will have in the future. Dogs acquired social cognitive skills during domestication that enhances the interspecific relationship with humans and helps their interactions. Etho-robotics research uses ethological principles and methods to derive complex behavioural models which can be transcribed to mathematical form and implemented into robots. Human-robot interaction studies can be conducted to evaluate and refine the implemented models. Etho-robotics research was already used to create behavioural models for attachment and for multiple aspects of human-robot interactions. The application of Fuzzy Rule Interpolation methods fits well the conceptually "spare rule-based" structure of the existing descriptive verbal ethological models, as in case of the descriptive verbal ethological models the "completeness" of the rule-base is not required. The main benefit of the FRI method adaptation in ethological model implementation is the fact, that it has a simple rule-based knowledge representation format. Because of this, even after numerical optimization of the model, the rules are still "human readable", and helps the formal validation of the model by the ethological experts. On the other side due to the FRI base, the model has still low computational demand and fits directly the requirements of the embedded implementations.