Plenary Lecture
Multimodal Control of a Robot Hand for Advanced Service Manipulation
Professor Angel P. del Pobil
Department of Engineering and Computer Science
Director, UJI Robotic Intelligence Laboratory
Universitat Jaume I Castellón
Spain
E-mail: apdpob@gmail.com
Abstract: Cognitive manipulation is one of the most important challenges in robotics. It involves three challenges: versatility, defined as the capability to adapt to different situations, instead of being limited to a particular task; autonomy, that concerns the level of independence in the robot operation, and dependability, that refers to the capability of successfully completing an action even under important modeling errors or inaccurate sensor information. A complete manipulation task involves two sequential actions: that of achieving a suitable grasp or contact configuration, and the subsequent motion required by the task. We propose a unified framework with the introduction of task-related aspects into the classical knowledge-based grasp concept, leading to task-oriented grasps. In a similar manner, grasp-related issues are also considered during the execution of a task, leading to grasp-oriented tasks. We call this unified representation physical interaction. In the talk I will first present a theoretical framework for the integrated specification of physical interaction tasks, supporting a great variety of actions. Next, the problem of autonomous planning of physical interaction tasks will be addressed. I will then focus on the dependable execution of these tasks, and adopt a sensor-based approach with three different types of sensor feedback: force, vision and tactile. The methods proposed provide important advances with respect to the state-of-the-art versatility, autonomy and dependability of cognitive robot manipulation, allowing to address a wide range of tasks. All these contributions are validated with several experiments using different real robots placed on household environments. The talk will be based on my latest book titled Robot Physical Interaction through the combination of Vision, Tactile and Force Feedback: Applications to Assistive Robotics, that has been published in the Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics (STAR) series in 2013, co-authored by Mario Prats and Pedro J. Sanz. This research was recipient of various awards, including the Georges Giralt European Award and the Robotdalen Scientific Award Honorary Mention.
Brief Biography of the Speaker: Angel Pasqual del Pobil is Professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at Jaume I University (Spain), founder director of the UJI Robotic Intelligence Laboratory, and a Visiting Professor at Sungkyungkwan University (Korea). He holds a B.S. in Physics (Electronics, 1986) and a Ph.D. in Engineering (Robotics, 1991), both from the University of Navarra. He has been Co-Chair of two Technical Committees of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society and is a member of the Governing Board of the Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS) Society and EURON. He has over 230 publications, including 11 books the last two published recently by Springer: Robot Physical Interaction through the combination of Vision, Tactile and Force Feedback (2013) and Robust Motion Detection in Real-life Scenarios (2012). Prof. del Pobil was co-organizer some 40 workshops and tutorials at ICRA, IROS, RSS, HRI and other major conferences. He was Program Co-Chair of the 11th International Conference on Industrial and Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, General Chair of five editions of the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing (2004-2008), Program Chair of the International Conference on Adaptive Behaviour (SAB 2014) and General Chair of the 2015 IEEE Summer School on Experimental Methodology, Performance Evaluation and Benchmarking in Robotics. He is Associate Editor for ICRA (2009-2015) and IROS (2007-2013) and has served on the program committees of over 115 international conferences, such as IJCAI, ICPR, ICRA, IROS, ICINCO, IAS, ICAR, etc. He has been involved in robotics research for the last 28 years, his past and present research interests include: humanoid robots, service robotics, internet robots, motion planning, mobile manipulation, visually-guided grasping, robot perception, multimodal sensorimotor transformations, robot physical and human interaction, visual servoing, robot learning, autonomous mental development, and the interplay between neurobiology and robotics. Professor del Pobil has been invited speaker of 56 tutorials, plenary talks, and seminars in 14 countries. He serves as associate or guest editor for eight journals, and as expert for research evaluation at the European Commission. He has been Principal Investigator of 28 research projects. Recent projects at the Robotic Intelligence Lab funded by the European Commission include: FP6 GUARDIANS (Group of Unmanned Assistant Robots Deployed In Aggregative Navigation supported by Scent detection), FP7 EYESHOTS (Heterogeneous 3-D Perception Across Visual Fragments), and FP7 GRASP (Emergence of Cognitive Grasping through Emulation, Introspection, and Surprise).