Abstract
What is your science fiction fantasy: A personal robot butler doing your household chores autonomously or going to the surgeon to buy a new bionic part to augment your body’s capabilities? Today, robots are increasingly making the journey from industry floors to our homes – examples include self-driving vehicles (on road and underwater), prosthetic devices, surgical assistants and service robots for drilling, mining and cleaning. The speaker will explore the scientific challenges in the exciting domain of ‘interactive, autonomous robotics’ and show some of the cutting edge research that is aimed at making robots as versatile, safe, reactive and adaptive as us humans. He will illustrate the spills and thrills of working with some of the world’s most sophisticated anthropomorphic robots like the SARCOS DB, HONDA ASIMO, the iLIMB Hand, the KUKA robot arm and the NAO footballers through interactive demonstrations and videos. The science fiction of truly embodied artificial intelligence has never been this close to science fact in robotics and the speaker will argue that it is the tremendous progress in data driven machine learning that is fuelling it.
About the speaker
Prof Sethu Vijayakumar received his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1998. He had been a Reader and Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California and a Staff Scientist at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute. He is currently Professor of Robotics and Director of the Institute for Perception, Action and Behavior at the University of Edinburgh. He is also the Microsoft Research/Royal Academy of Engineering Senior Research Fellow in Learning Robotics.
Prof Vijayakumar’s research interest spans a broad interdisciplinary curriculum involving basic research in the fields of robotics, statistical machine learning, motor control, planning and optimization in autonomous systems and computational neuroscience. He is the author of over 150 highly cited publications in these fields and has pioneered the use of large scale machine learning techniques for real-time, online adaptive control of anthropomorphic robotic systems.
Prof Vijayakumar received numerous awards including the 2013 IEEE Transactions in Robotics Best Paper Award, IEEE Vincent Bendix Award and the NEC C&C Student Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
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