Plenary Speakers
Plenary Speech I
Time: 09:30-10:20, December 12, 2017
Venue: Howard Hall, B2, Howard Plaza Hotel
Chair: Prof. Shigeki Sugano
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Torsten Kroeger
Director
Intelligent Process Control and Robotics Laboratory
Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
Germany
Sensor-based Control, Real-time Motion Planning, and Reinforcement Learning for Industrial Robots
Abstract
Embedding multiple sensors - force/torque, vision, and distance - in the feedback loops of motion controllers has enabled new robot applications. For instance, safe human-robot interaction and many assembly tasks that could not be automated before. As important as these real-time control features is the ability to plan robot motions deterministically and in real-time. To enable spontaneous changes from sensor-guided robot motion control (e.g., force/torque or visual servo control) to trajectory-following motion control, an algorithmic framework is explained that lets us compute robot motions deterministically within less than one millisecond. The resulting class of on-line trajectory generation algorithms serves as an intermediate layer between low-level motion control and high-level sensor-based motion planning. Online motion generation from arbitrary states is an essential feature for autonomous hybrid switched motion control systems. Building upon this framework and with the goal of significantly reducing the amount of resources needed for programing industrial and service robots, reinforcement learning offers a yet unused potential that will be introduced as well. Samples and use-cases - including manipulation and human-robot interaction tasks - will accompany the talk in order to provide a comprehensible insight into these interesting and relevant fields of robotics.
Short Biography
Torsten is a Full Professor of Computer Science and the Director of Intelligent Process Control and Robotics Laboratory (IPR) of the Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics (IAR) at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). He is also a Visiting Scientist at Stanford University and the founder of Reflexxes. From 2014 to 2017, he was a Staff Roboticist and the Head of the Robotics Software Division at Google. His research interests are real-time motion planning, transfer learning, and deterministic distributed real-time systems. Among many awards, he received Early Career Award of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.
Plenary Speech II
Time:10:40-11:30, December 12,2017
Venue:Howard Hall, B2, Howard Plaza Hotel Taipei
Chair:Prof. Makoto Mizukawa
Prof. Han Ding
Academician, Chinese Academy of Sciences
China
Theory and Technology of Tri-Co Robots
Abstract
The Tri-Co Robots (Coexisting-Cooperative-Cognitive Robots) are those that can naturally interact and collaborate with the operating environment, human as well as other robots, and be adaptive to the complex dynamic environments. The characteristics of Tri-Co robots include: compliant and dexterous structure, multi-modal perception, distributed autonomous and collaborative ability. This talkwill introduce the current research activities of robotics in China, especially the Tri-Robot Research Plan of NSFC (National Natural Science Foundation of China), including the scientific challenges, key scientific problems and main research contents of the plan from the aspects of structure, perception and control, followed by the forecasts on China’s expected breakthroughs and goals in Tri-Co robot research domain. After that, the challenges of robotic techniques in machining are analyzed and summarized, and the recent research works in our group are also introduced.
Short Biography
Prof. Han Ding received his Ph.D. degree in Mechatronics from HuazhongUniversity of Science & Technology in 1989. Supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Prof. Ding worked at University of Stuttgart, Germany in 1993. He obtained the National Distinguished Youth Scientific Fund in 1997 and was employed as the “Cheung Kong” Chair Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2001. He was elected a member of Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2013.
Prof. Ding has long dedicated himself to the research work in the field of robotics and digital manufacturing and successfully combines the robotics and manufacturing technologies. He published three academic books and more than 300 journal papers, and licensed more than 60 patents in China. Prof. Ding acted as an Associate Editor (2003-2007) and an Editor (2011-) of IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering. He was a Technical Editor of IEEE/ASME Trans. on Mechatronics from 2010 to 2014. Currently, he is a Senior Editor of IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. As a General Co-Chair, he hosted the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation held in Shanghai, China in 2011.
