Institutionen för naturvetenskap och teknik

AASS Seminar - 20 Years of AI and Robotics at ISR/IST

02 mars 2017 13:00 T131, Teknikhuset

The research centre AASS arranges a seminar with Pedro U. Lima, Institute for Systems and Robotics, Instituto Superior Tecnico (ISR/IST) U. Lisboa, Portugal

Abstract

In this talk I will overview the key topics of my research in AI and Robotics in the past 20+ years at ISR/IST, mostly based on the work of 20 PhD students (16 of which successfully finished), several post-doctoral fellows and many MSc students, with the goal to establish bridges with the AASS researchers at ORU, so as to boost the chances for some productive joint work during my 3-month stay there. I will state my holistic approach to intelligent robots and systems, in the intersection of AI and systems&control theory concepts and formal methods, with a strong component of applications to multi-robot systems. Examples of contributions made in areas such as formation control, (active) cooperative perception, planning under uncertainty, task plan representation and supervision and coordination of robot collectives using institutions will be presented. My passion for robot competitions and their value in promoting R&D in Robotics will underlie a significant part of the talk, and will also enable referring to a more recent interest on benchmarking robot systems.

Short bio

Pedro U. Lima (Ph.D., Associate Professor with Habilitation) received the Licenciatura (5 years) and M.Sc degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Instituto Superior Tecnico (IST) in 1984 and 1989, respectively, and the Ph.D. (1994) in Electrical Engineering at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, NY, USA. Currently, he is a Professor at IST, Universidade de Lisboa, and a researcher of the Institute for Systems and Robotics (ISR), where he is the coordinator of the Intelligent Robots and Systems group. He is the co-author of two books, and member of the Editorial Board of the Elsevier Journal of Robotics and Autonomous Systems. His research interests lie in the areas of discrete event models of robot tasks and planning under uncertainty, with applications to networked robot systems. He has supervised successfully 16 PhD students since 2002, and currently (co-)supervises another 4 PhD students.

Pedro Lima is a Trustee of the RoboCup Federation, and was the General Chair of RoboCup2004, held in Lisbon. He was President and founding member of the Portuguese Robotics Society, was National Delegate to EU and ESA Space Robotics programs and was awarded a 6-month Chair of Excellence at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain in 2010. He has been very active in EU research projects and was the Coordinator of the FP7 Coordination Action RoCKIn and member of the Advisory Board of the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC), whose first edition will take place in the United Arab Emirates in March 2017.

He has also been very active in the promotion of Science and Technology to the society, through the organization of Robotics events in Portugal, including the Portuguese Robotics Open since 2001.