IEEE ICMA 2010 Conference

Plenary Talk 3

From Biological Systems to Intelligent Robots: Engineering Challenges

Huosheng Hu, Ph.D.
Professor
School of Computer Science & Electronic Engineering
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park, Colchester CO4 3SQ, United Kingdom
E-mail: hhu@essex.ac.uk

Abstract:

After recent advancement of computing and robotics technologies, intelligent robots are soon ready to serve us in our home, hospital, office and everywhere. They are mobile, autonomous and interactive, inspired from behaviour demonstration of biological systems. A number of new application areas have currently received significant interests in the robotics community, including service robots, medical robots, education robots and entertainment robots, etc. However, these robots face a number of challenges. Firstly, they have to deal with uncertainty within the systems, such as sensor noise, actuator inaccuracy, and components failure. Secondly, they have to handle a huge uncertainty in the real world, which is dynamically changing over time. Thirdly, inspiration from biological systems is an important issue to be addressed in the design of intelligent robots since it could provide some guidance to solve the problem. Finally, human-robot interaction is a key for success, including communicating with and navigation around humans. In this talk, I will briefly overview the current state of art robotics technologies, and present our research work toward the development of advanced theory and technologies, based on inspiration from biological systems. More specifically, bio-mimetic system modelling, intelligent wheelchairs, service robots and swarm robotics are discussed respectively, and some preliminary results are demonstrated via video.

Huosheng Hu  is a Professor in the School of Computer Science & Electronic Engineering at the University of Essex, leading the Human-Centred Robotics Research. He received the MSc degree in industrial automation from the Central South University in China and the PhD degree in robotics from the University of Oxford in the U.K. His research interests include behaviour-based robotics, human-robot interaction, service robots, embedded systems, data fusion, learning algorithms, mechatronics, and pervasive computing. He has published over 300 papers in journals, books and conferences in these areas, and received a number of best paper awards. Prof. Hu is a Fellow of Institute of Engineering & Technology, a Fellow of Institute of Measurement & Control, a senior member of IEEE and ACM, a founding member of IEEE Robotics & Automation Society Technical committee on Networked Robots. He has been a Program Chair or a member of Advisory/Organising Committee for many international conferences such as IEEE IROS, ICRA, ICMA, ROBIO, and IASTED RA and CA conferences. He is currently Editor-in-Chief for International Journal of Automation and Computing. He is a member of UK EPSRC Peer Review College, and a reviewer for a large number of international journals such as IEEE Transactions on Robotics, Automatic Control, Biomedical Engineering, Industrial Electronics, SMC, Neural Networks and International Journal of Robotics Research.