IPAB Workshop: Building motion models that are both discrete and continuous

Date: 
Thu, 02/11/2017 - 12:45
Location: 
Informatics Forum 4.31/4.33, University of Edinburgh
Speaker: 
Vladimir Ivan
University of Edinburgh

The next IPAB workshop will take place on Thursday November 2nd at the Informatics Forum in room 4.31/4.33, pastries will be provided.  

Vladimir Ivan will give a talk "Building motion models that are both discrete and continuous".

 

*Abstract:* Robot motion has continuous properties, such as control effort and distance to the goal, but also discrete properties, e.g.

sequence of contacts or an order in which to manipulate objects.

Gateway Event: Introduction to humanoid robot's full-body manipulation and development of high-power and robust hardware

Date: 
Tue, 14/11/2017 - 14:00 to Wed, 15/11/2017 - 13:45
Location: 
Informatics Forum 4.31/4.33, University of Edinburgh
Speaker: 
Shunichi Nozawa
JSK Robotics Lab (University of Tokyo)

On Tuesday November 14th, Shunichi Nozawa from the JSK Robotics Lab at the University of Tokyo, will be giving a talk at the Informatics Forum.

Talk title: Introduction to humanoid robot's full-body manipulation and development of high-power and robust hardware

RSE Franco-Scottish Lecture: Shared Autonomy: The Future of Interactive Robotics

Date: 
Wed, 15/11/2017 - 18:00 to Thu, 16/11/2017 - 17:45
Location: 
The Royal Society of Edinburgh
Speaker: 
Professor Sethu Vijayakumar
University of Edinburgh

 

The next generation of robots are going to work much more closely with humans and with other robots, and interact significantly with the environment around them. As a result, the key paradigms are shifting from isolated decision-making systems to one that involves shared control – with significant autonomy devolved to the robot platform; and end-users in the loop making only high-level decisions.

Professor Sethu Vijayakumar keynote at IGD Leaders Forum

Submitted by Colette Bush on Fri, 13/10/2017 - 13:45

Professor Sethu Vijayakumar will be a keynote speaker at the IGD Leaders Forum on 18th October in London. The topic for discussion will be Artificial Intelligence in the food industry and will comprise of the following:

Automation is accelerating in food and grocery. Will this promote productivity and prosperity or will it feed the fires of discontent and rebellion?

- Is AI about to transform the business world?

- Is it any different to previous waves of technology?

- What ethical challenges will it present?

Welcome to three new Centre academics

Submitted by Colette Bush on Fri, 13/10/2017 - 13:23

We are delighted to announce the arrival of three new academics to our fast-growing centre. We would like to welcome Dr Lynne Baillie, Dr Hakan Bilen and Dr Thusha Rajendran and all of the experience and expertise they will bring to the Centre.

Dr Lynne Baillie

Lynne is based in the department of MACS at Heriot-Watt University. Her reseach interests are Health and Rehabilitation Technologies & Robotics, Mobile Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Human Robotic Interaction (HRI).

Git Tutorial

Date: 
Fri, 13/10/2017 - 14:00 to Sat, 14/10/2017 - 13:45
Location: 
Appleton Tower room 7.14, University of Edinburgh
Speaker: 
Vladimir Ivan
University of Einburgh

The Git Tutorial will cover the following:

- Adding READMEs and .gitignore.

- Using a GUI to manage file changes.

- Using a GUI to visualize the history of the repo.

- Creating a feature branch.

- Switching between branches.

- Merging changes from other branches.

- Rebasing a branch.

- Managing remotes.

- Pushing/pulling branches to/from the remote.

- Creating pull requests.

- Reviewing pull requests.

- Merging pull requests.

- Creating, solving, and closing issues.

 

Welcome to Dr. Stefano Albrecht

Submitted by Zoe McGonigle on Wed, 11/10/2017 - 16:47

We would like to welcome Dr. Stefano Albrecht as a supervisor for the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics! He is the new Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence in the School of Informatics at The University of Edinburgh. His main research interests are in the areas of autonomous agents, multi-agent systems, machine learning, and game theory, with a focus on sequential decision making under uncertainty.

Gateway Event: Designing Processors to Accelerate Robot Motion Planning

Date: 
Wed, 15/11/2017 - 14:30
Location: 
Robotarium Seminar room, Heriot-Watt University
Speaker: 
Professor Daniel J. Sorin
Duke University

Abstract: We have developed a hardware accelerator for motion planning, a critical operation in robotics. I will  present the microarchitecture of our accelerator and describe a prototype implementation on an FPGA. Experimental results show that, compared to the state of the art, the accelerator improves performance by three orders of magnitude and improves power consumption by more than one order of magnitude. These gains are achieved through careful hardware/software co-design.

Welcome to Dr Ioannis Konstas

Submitted by Anne Murphy on Tue, 26/09/2017 - 15:22

Ioannis Konstas recently joined as an assistant professor at Heriot Watt University, Edinburgh. His main research interest focuses on the area of Natural Language Processing and Natural Language Generation (NLG) with an emphasis on data-driven deep learning methods. 

Before that he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington, Seattle, collaborating with Prof. Luke Zettlemoyer (2015-2017).