Keynote Lectures

Advanced Manufacturing of Biopharmaceuticals
Richard D. Braatz, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States, United States

Bio-inspired Soft Robotics: Challenges Ahead Toward the Next Generation of Intelligent Machines
Fumiya Iida, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, United Kingdom

Walking and Flying Robots for Challenging Environments
Roland Siegwart, ETH Zurich, Switzerland, Switzerland

Performance of a Micro-pump for a New Generation of Small Satellites Propulsion Systems: Comparison of Various Control Design Strategies
Houria Siguerdidjane, CentraleSupelec, France, France

Shared Autonomy for Interactive Robotics: Closing the Loop
Sethu Vijayakumar, The University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom, United Kingdom

Advanced Manufacturing of Biopharmaceuticals

Richard D. Braatz
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States
http://web.mit.edu/braatzgroup/

Brief Bio
Richard D. Braatz is the Edwin R. Gilliland Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he does research in control theory and its application to biomedical, pharmaceutical, energy, and nanotechnology systems. He received MS and PhD degrees from the California Institute of Technology and was the Millennium Chair and Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University before moving to MIT. He has consulted or collaborated with more than 20 companies including IBM, United Technologies Corporation, DuPont, and Novartis. Honors include the Donald P. Eckman Award from the American Automatic Control Council, the Curtis W. McGraw Research Award from the Engineering Research Council, the IEEE Control Systems Society Transition to Practice Award, and the Technical Innovation Award from the International Society of Automation. He is a Fellow of IEEE, IFAC, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Abstract
This presentation describes the integrated informatics, process modeling, automation, and control of a desktop pilot plant facility for the rapid advanced manufacturing of multiple biologic drugs. The project team is designing new biological cell lines, designing small-scale process equipment, developing real-time sensors, constructing first-principles and data-driven models, and employing feedforward and feedback controls. Although the manufacturing process uses biological cells, the talk does not require any background in biology, and is focused on the design of the manufacturing platform, including dynamic simulation of mixed continuous-discrete systems, task scheduling, nonlinear adaptive control, and plant-wide control.

Bio-inspired Soft Robotics: Challenges Ahead Toward the Next Generation of Intelligent Machines

Fumiya Iida
University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/Main/FI224

Brief Bio
Fumiya Iida is a university lecturer at Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge. He received his bachelor and master degrees in mechanical engineering at Tokyo University of Science (Japan, 1999), and Dr. sc. nat. in Informatics at University of Zurich (Switzerland, 2006). In 2004 and 2005, he was also engaged in biomechanics research of human locomotion at Locomotion Laboratory, University of Jena (Germany). From 2006 to 2009, he worked as a postdoctoral associate at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology in USA. In 2006, he awarded the Fellowship for Prospective Researchers from the Swiss National Science Foundation, and in 2009, the Swiss National Science Foundation Professorship hosted by ETH Zurich. In 2014 he moved to the University of Cambridge as the director of Bio-Inspired Robotics Laboratory. His research interest includes biologically inspired robotics, embodied artificial intelligence, and biomechanics, where he was involved in a number of research projects related to dynamic legged locomotion, navigation of autonomous robots, human-machine interactions, and self-reconfigurable soft robots.URL: http://divf.eng.cam.ac.uk/birl/

Abstract

Soft deformable body structures in biological systems are known to play considerable roles in their behavioral functionalities and adaptability in complex dynamic task-environments, whereas it is largely unexplored in robotic systems. In this lecture, we discuss the state-of-the-art soft robotics technologies which tackle the engineering challenges such as fabrication, modeling, sensing, actuation, and control of bio-inspired soft robots. Based on the overview of the technologies, we speculate research challenges toward the animal-like soft robots that deform, adapt, and grow, together with potential practical applications in the near future.

Walking and Flying Robots for Challenging Environments

Roland Siegwart
ETH Zurich, Switzerland
http://www.asl.ethz.ch/people/rolandsi

Brief Bio
Roland Siegwart (born in 1959) is professor for autonomous mobile robots at ETH Zurich, founding co-director of the Wyss Zurich and member of the board of directors of multiple high tech companies. He studied mechanical engineering at ETH, brought up a spin-off company, spent ten years as professor at EPFL Lausanne (1996 – 2006), was vice president of ETH Zurich (2010 -2014) and held visiting positions at Stanford University and NASA Ames.He is and was the coordinator of multiple European projects and co-founder of half a dozen spin-off companies. He is IEEE Fellow and recipient of the IEEE RAS Pioneer award and the IEEE RAS Inaba Technical Award. He is on the editorial board of multiple journals in robotics and was a general chair of several conferences in robotics including IROS 2002, AIM 2007, FSR 2007, ISRR 2009, FSR 2017 and CoRL 2018. His interests are in the design and navigation of wheeled, walking and flying robots operating in complex and highly dynamical environments. Hi is a strong promotor of innovation and entrepreneurship.

Abstract

Disaster response operations or industrial inspections are among of the most rewarding but also very challenging tasks for autonomous mobile robot. While robots are already doing a wonderful job as factory work-horses or floor cleaning devices, operations in highly unstructured and unknown environments, which are typically encountered after disasters, in mines or on offshore oil rigs are still a major challenge.

Within this talk, our latest research results in legged and flying robots systems, designed to operate in complex environments, are presented and discussed.

Our electrically powered legged quadruped robots are designed for high agility, efficiency and robustness in rough terrain. This is realized through an optimal exploitation of the natural dynamics and serial elastic actuation. Equipped with laser scanners and cameras, our quadruped StarlETH and ANYmal are able to autonomously find their path through rough terrain, climb stairs and build a 3D map of their environment.

For fast inspection of complex environments, flying robots are probably the most efficient and versatile devices. However, the limited payload and computing power of multi-copters renders autonomous navigation quite challenging. Thanks to our custom designed visual-inertial sensor, real-time on-board localization, mapping and planning has become feasible and enables our multi-copters for advanced rescue and inspection tasks, even in GPS-denied environments.

Overcoming the limited power autonomy and flight range of multi-copters is the main focus of our research in unmanned solar airplanes. Our most recent design of a fixed wing solar airplane with 5.6 m wing span allows for unlimited flight duration, thus enabling search and rescue from the air over large environments. Thanks to on-board visual sensing, these solar airplanes are also capable to fly very close to ground and plan their path around obstacles.

Performance of a Micro-pump for a New Generation of Small Satellites Propulsion Systems: Comparison of Various Control Design Strategies

Houria Siguerdidjane
CentraleSupelec, France
http://www.supelec.fr/360_p_10008/houria-siguerdidjane.html

Brief Bio
Houria Siguerdidjane is full Professor and Research Director Deputy of CentraleSupélec, in charge of the projects related to the new University of Paris-Saclay. Her teaching activity at the Automatic Control Department and research interests at the Signals and Systems Laboratory, include linear and nonlinear control systems and applications to aerospace, mechanical and power systems problems. She is an Associate Editor of the IFAC Journal Control Engineering Practice (CEP) and for the actual triennial, she is the Vice-Chair of the IFAC Aerospace Technical Committee and nominated as member of the IFAC Policy Committee.Houria Siguerdidjane, obtained an Engineering degree from Supélec (now CentraleSupélec). She received the Doctorate degree in Automatic Control and Signal Processing in 1985 and the Habilitation degree in Physics Sciences from University Paris XI (in 1998). She held an AVH Fellowship for a post-doctoral position (in 1989) in the Department of Mathematics at Munich Technical University where her main project concerned the optimization of aircrafts trajectories.In 1994-1995, she was on sabbatical leave at the industrial company AlstomT&D, where her main interest was the application of new concepts to improve the relaying protection performance in high voltage electrical networks.Prof. Siguerdidjane has been serving, as the Chair of the IFAC Aerospace Technical Committee from 2006 to 2014. She is recipient of the 2012 IFAC-France Award.In 2013, she was also Director Deputy of Research and Industrial Partnerships of Metz Campus.

Abstract

In a context of more future growth of small satellite activities, the space industry is attentive to any new developments, applications or new technologies related to space vehicles that may bring both better performance improvements and costs reduction, this is with the vision to pave the way to potential innovative missions. Thereby, this has enhanced the motivation of the engineers to initiate and to undertake side by side with the researchers the necessary developments at different levels.

So, this keynote lecture will address and discuss the theoretical research work that we have carried out over the last couple of years on a micro pump for a new generation of small satellites propulsion systems, for which the primary purpose was to conceive and to build a prototype device which should demonstrate the desired performance.

Then, in a first step, the research work under consideration has been focused on the way used in order to increase the lifetime of the small satellites, which thus contributes to reduce the costs of launching. In a second step, we describe the investigations led to state the adequate modelling of the system, as well as to develop and to implement the designed automatic control procedures that should make the micro pump system capable to meet the required specifications. Finally, we will show the achieved performance through numerical simulations and the validation with a campaign of experimental tests as well.

This talk is sponsored by ECCAI.

Shared Autonomy for Interactive Robotics: Closing the Loop

Sethu Vijayakumar
The University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Brief Bio
Sethu Vijayakumar is the Professor of Robotics in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, UK and Director of the Institute for Perception, Action and Behavior (IPAB) as well as the co-Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics. Since August 2007, he holds the prestigious Senior Research Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering, co-funded by Microsoft Research. He also holds additional appointments as an Adjunct Faculty of the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles and a Visiting Research Scientist at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Japan. Prof. Vijayakumar, who has a PhD from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, has pioneered the use of large scale machine learning techniques in the real time control of large degree of freedom anthropomorphic robotic systems including the SARCOS and the HONDA ASIMO humanoid robots, KUKA-DLR robot arm and iLIMB prosthetic hand. His research interest spans a broad interdisciplinary curriculum ranging from statistical machine learning, adaptive control, and actuator design to human motor control and computational neuroscience. He is the author of over 150 highly cited publications in these fields and the winner of the IEEE Vincent Bendix award, the Japanese Monbusho fellowship, 2013 IEEE Transaction on Robotics Best Paper Award and several other awards from leading conferences. He has been the scientific coordinator and lead PI for a number of national, EU and international research projects, attracting over £25M in research funding over the past 8 years besides serving on numerous EU, DFG and NSF grant review panels and program committees of leading machine learning and robotics conferences. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a keen science communicator with a significant annual outreach agenda.Webpage: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/svijayak

Abstract

The next generation of robots are going to work much more closely with humans, other robots and interact significantly with the environment around it. As a result, the key paradigms are shifting from isolated decision making systems to one that involves sharing control -- with significant autonomy devolved to the RAS systems; and end-users in the loop making only high level decisions.
The key questions is: while the robots are ready to share control, what is the optimal trade-off between autonomy and control that we are comfortable with?
This talk will look at technologies ranging from robust multi-modal sensing, shared representations, compliant actuation and real-time learning and adaptation that are enabling us to reap the benefits of increased autonomy while still feeling securely in control.
Domains where this debate is relevant NOW include self-driving cars, mining, shared manufacturing, exoskeletons for rehabilitation, active prosthetics, large scale scheduling (e.g. transport) systems as well as Oil and Gas exploration to list a few.