The Centre of Research Excellence for Advanced Cooperative Systems (ACROSS) invites you to the research seminar
"Simple Heuristics for Robotic Cooperation: Keep Learning from Nature"
held by Prof. Nikos C. Tsourveloudis, Technical University of Crete, Greece.
The seminar will take place on Wednesday, September 10th, 2014, starting at 13:00 in Grand Hotel Park, Dubrovnik.
More about the speaker and the seminar can be found in the detailed news content.
Abstract:
Several cooperative behaviour schemes, initially observed in the wild, have been mimicked to compose bio-inspired solutions to almost all robotic related problems. Mimicking animal has proved to be an innovative tool for designing and controlling robotic systems. Emergent biomimetic control methodologies may be developed by focusing at the interaction among the layered animal behaviours themselves and between the behaviours and the dynamic environment. The talk will focus on the bio-inspired paradigm of group hunting mammals in land (wolves) and the sea (dolphins), intending to make this knowledge applicable to the coordination problem of heterogeneous robotic teams. The objective is to present, define and discuss the required level of inference capabilities and role specialization needed for robotic navigation and coordination purposes. Emphasis will be given on the fact that humans and animals decide and conclude about unknown features of their world under constraints of limited time, knowledge, and computational capacity. And despite their cognitive limitations built and use domain specific heuristics that allow for fast problem solving (and task specific successful behaviors). As robots and agents may be benefited from these observations, potential application areas will be included in the discussion.
Biography:
Nikos Tsourveloudis is a professor of manufacturing technology at the Technical University of Crete (TUC), Chania, Greece, where he leads the Intelligent Systems and Robotics Laboratory and the Machine Tools Laboratory. His research interests are mainly in the area of autonomous navigation of field robots. His teaching focuses on manufacturing and robotic technologies and he published more than 100 scientific papers on these topics. Dr. Tsourveloudis serves in the editorial board of numerous scientific journals and conferences. He is a member of professional and scientific organizations around the globe, and several public organizations and private companies have funded his research. Dr. Tsourveloudis’ research group has been honored with several prizes and awards for their research efforts and also for transferring academic knowledge into real industrial prototypes. The most recent awards include: the 3rd EURON/EUROR Robotic Technology Transfer award (2009), the 1st Car Safety award at the Shell Eco Marathon in 2010 and 2011, the Excellent Research Achievements award by the TUC (2010) and a Chair-of-Excellence in Robotics awarded by the University Carlos III of Madrid and the Santander Bank, Spain (2011).