Soon Poh Heah, Assistant CEO, JTC, Singapore

Overcoming Building & Infrastructure challenges with Robotics and Automation Solutions​​

JTC, as the lead government agency for the development of industrial infrastructure in Singapore, spearheads innovative space solutions to support and catalyse the growth of new industries and transform existing enterprises. In his address, Mr Heah will share about potential opportunities for the implementation and test-bedding of robotics and automation solutions in Building & Infrastructure projects.  

Bio: Soon Poh is the Assistant Chief Executive Officer (Engineering and Operations) at JTC, Singapore’s lead government agency responsible for the development of industrial infrastructure to catalyse the growth of new industries and transform existing enterprises. Overseeing the Engineering and Operations Group, Soon Poh is responsible for JTC’s engineering design, project management, facility and estate management, as well as security and workplace safety for all JTC’s estates and developments.

Soon Poh also oversees JTC’s appointment as the public sector’s Centre of Excellence for building and infrastructure, facilities management and underground caverns. In the area of facilities management and operations, Soon Poh is leading the implementation of J-Ops, an integrated building and estate management system, across all of JTC’s high-rise buildings.

Ehsan Asadi, Co-founder, Director and Principal Scientist, Transforma Robotics, Singapore

Infrastructure Service Robots: Enhancing Productivity and Safety​

The talk is about the application of robots for specific tasks in the construction industry, where robots could attain the required level of autonomy and reliability: interior finishing of industrial developments with high walls and  post-construction quality assessment - the motivation, and challenges, as well as current state of our solutions, PictoBot and QuicaBot. Despite the rapid technology evolution, construction services are mostly labor-dependent and performed with conventional techniques where safety is always a concern. Beside the low efficiency in this sector, the needs for building, construction and maintenance are growing rapidly all around the world while facing a future shortage of skilled workers and wage increases. It is essential to introduce novel robotic technologies that can be applied to boost productivity by focusing on quality and time saving, as well as to enhance safety and to reduce cost compared to the traditional methods.  

Bio: Ehsan Asadi is a co-founder and director at Transforma Robotics, a spin off company from Nanyang Technological University, and serves as principal scientist in robotics. He obtained his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees both in Mechanical Engineering and his Ph.D degree in Aerospace Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano, Italy, in 2013. Previously, he has worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Robotics Research Center, NTU, Singapore, as well as other research groups and robotics companies including, Poli-rotorcraft, Italy, and Terabee S.A.S, France. His main research interests include sensor fusion, vision-aided inertial navigation, simultaneous localization and mapping, robot vision and field robotics. His involvement in these areas has led to co-authoring of more than 13 papers in refereed journals, international conferences and book chapters. He has served as reviewer for scientific journals and conferences, including the IEEE Transactions in Robotics, Advanced Robotics Systems, ICRA and IROS.

Thilo Grimm, Managing Director, SEW-Eurodrive, Singapore

The real “Sm@rt Factory”- SEW-EURODRIVE’s approach towards Industrie 4.0​

Interoperability, Virtualization, Decentralization, Real-time capability, Service Orientation, Modularity - these are the design principles of Industrie 4.0. The presentation will give an outlook into SEW-EURODRIVE’s holistic approach and enabling technologies according to the design principles of Industrie 4.0.

Bio: Thilo Grimm is Managing Director of SEW-EURODRIVE Pte. Ltd., South-East Asia’s Sales, Engineering and Assembly Center of SEW-EURODRIVE. For over 10 years Thilo has focused on business development for Drive Technology in various industries such as Automotive, Food & Beverage, Logistics, Mining, Port Machinery etc. and the specific technological challenges in Asian countries. He has extensive experience in managing innovation and know-how transfer related to Drive Technology in Material Handling and is one of SEW-EURODRIVE’s promoters of smart factory solutions. Subsequent to his studies of Chinese language, Thilo received a degree in Engineering from the Cooperative State University Karlsruhe. Further he holds a dual Executive MBA degree from INSEAD, Singapore and TSINGHUA University, Beijing.

Brendel Torsten, Partner, io-consultants GmbH, Germany

Industry 4.0 and Facilities Design

As we are moving into Industry 4.0, with high level of automation and information handling, it opens up a lot of opportunities in intra-building (factory) and inter-building logistics. The design of these facilities have to take into account of these opportunities and the designs have to change accordingly to capitalize on these opportunities. This presentation explore the meaning of Industry 4.0 and design considerations for industrial facilities.

Bio: Torsten Brendel has been partner of io-consultants since 2005 and is responsible for the catering department in Germany, which focuses on the planning of large food facilities such as canteens, employee restaurants and state-of-the-art catering facilities. With his expertise, Torsten Brendel also became general manager at io-consultants’ subsidiary in Dubai. The spectrum of io-consultants catering services ranges from planning and realisation of individual areas such as kitchen or cooling technology to the general planning of large, new investment objects at different airports around the world.

Rainer Bischoff, Head of Corporate Research, KUKA Roboter, Germany

Recent KUKA Innovations and Future Challenges​

Bio: Dr. Bischoff is Head of KUKA’s Corporate Research department responsible for research and technology development preceding product development. Dr. Bischoff received his “Doktor-Ingenieur“ degree from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology for his contributions towards the development of personal robots. He serves as Vice-President Industry of euRobotics AISBL – the European Robotics Association he helped to create to unite European roboticists and to engage in a public-private partnership with the European Commission. For leadership and outstanding contributions to the cooperation of academia and industry, and for managing and promoting significant technology transfer in the area of industrial and service robotics he was granted the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career Award in 2012. In 2015, he received the IROS Toshio Fukuda Young Professional Award for his technical contributions to the personal robotic assistant HERMES and his effort in uniting the European Robotics Community. Dr. Bischoff has authored over 100 papers, receiving three best paper awards. In 2006, Dr. Bischoff received the IEEE/IFR Invention and Entrepreneurship Award for a flexible and scalable collision avoidance system for industrial robots, and in 2012, he was granted the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career Award for leadership and outstanding contributions to the cooperation of academia and industry, and for managing and promoting significant technology transfer in the area of industrial and service robotics.

Patric Hed, Technology Manager, Robots & Applications, ABB Robotics

Human Interaction and Programming of Robots in the Future

The landscape of robot programming and human interaction with robots is constantly evolving. Technologies like 3D simulation and offline programming are becoming mainstream tools in the robot industry, while the recent interest in collaborative robots is driving new programming concepts, such as lead-through-teaching. This presentation will also elaborate on opportunities in deploying new technologies in the field of virtual reality and augmented reality for simplified, enhanced and immersive interaction with industrial robots from ABB.  

Bio: Patric Hed holds a MSc Degree in Automation and is an international management executive with experience from working with robotics in Sweden, USA, Germany and China. Mr Hed has held a number of positions in the field of robotics over the last 20 years including R&D Manager of ABB Software Products, Engineering Manager of Robot Applications, Global Product Manager of ABB Arc Welding Products, Business Unit Manager at ESAB Welding Automation and he is currently holding the position as Global Technology Manager for Robots & Applications in ABB Robotics.

François Boucher, Executive Vice President, Kinova Inc., Canada

Beyond the Smart Factory: People and Robots​

The principles of Industry 4.0 are well known. Their current impact on many aspects of product and service offerings, as well as the individual lives of customers, is inevitable. The question is how to best approach this transformation while respecting the human dimension. Job security, “adding value to” instead of “replacing” humans, declared safety vs perceived safety and the knowledge foundations needed to keep workers trained and evolving will all be addressed in this engaging presentation.

Bio: François Boucher is the Executive VP of Kinova Inc. in Boisbriand, Canada. He received his MBA and a Bachelor degree in Physics Engineering from Laval University. After his graduation, he worked briefly in a technology transfer and investment company before joining Kinova in its early days to develop the service robotics market. Through his passion for robotics, he continues to have an eye towards identifying and developing new opportunity while leading business growth. He can be contacted at fboucher@kinovarobotics.com.

David Hanson, Founder & CEO, Hanson Robotics

Building Trust with Robots in Service Industries

Robots and intelligent machines are progressing at unprecedented rates, demonstrating great recent leaps in intelligence, perception, expressivity, and the ability to navigate the real world. Humanoid robots will create radical new opportunities in a broad range of commercial applications, including customer service, retail and event promotion, healthcare, education, and entertainment. As humans have an innate preference to perceive faces and empathize with human facial expressions, service robots designed with pleasing aesthetics and a full range of human expressions are in a better position to inspire trust and empathy from the people with whom they interact. These robots will gain faster acceptance, develop richer interaction with people, and drive better results from these interactions, creating significant utilization value for businesses.

Bio: Dr. David Hanson has built a worldwide reputation for creating the world’s most humanlike, empathetic robots, endowed with remarkable expressiveness, aesthetics and interactivity. He has produced many renowned, one-of-a-kind robot characters that have received massive media and public acclaim.

Dr. Hanson publishes regularly in materials science, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and robotics journals, including SPIE, IEEE, the International Journal of Cognitive Science, IROS, AAAI and AI magazine. He has been featured in numerous popular media outlets including New York Times, Popular Science, Scientific American, the BBC and CNN. He has been labeled a "genius" by both PC Magazine and WIRED, and has earned awards from NASA, NSF, AAAI, Tech Titans’ Innovator of the Year, and Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial.

At Walt Disney Imagineering, Dr. Hanson worked as both a sculptor and a technical consultant. He has spoken at venues including IEEE, SPIE, AAAI, DARPA, MIT, Dartmouth, Brown, Google, Sandia Labs, UCSD and AAAS annual meeting. Dr. Hanson received his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in film/animation/video, and his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Dallas in interactive arts and engineering.

Nelson Chang, Manager, Industrial Technology Research Institute, Taiwan

ITRI’s Robotic-based Automation Technology for Industrial Applications​

Industrial 4.0 has been receiving great attention recently. Intelligent robots have been playing a key role in manufacturing. ITRI has been developing robots for both service applications and industrial applications. In this presentation, ITRI will share its experience in industrial robot applications and technology development.

Bio: Nelson Yen-Chung Chang is a department manager in Intelligent Robotics Division, Mechanical and Mechatronics Systems Labs, Industrial Technology Research Institute. He has been working as a senior researcher in robotics vision, research and development manager, and manager of Robot System Integration Department. He majored in VLSI/IC design and was interested in robotic vision. His current research interest is focused on service robot application and technology development.

Chunlin Ji, Co-founder & Vice President, Kuang-Chi Institute of Advanced Technology, China

Spiritual Machines

The speaker will introduce Kuang-Chi Global Community of Innovation (GCI) and Prometheus Centre, as well as AI technologies, which are developed by our oversea holding companies, including EyeSight, Beyond Verbal, AgentVI and ElMindA. He will also cover Kuang-Chi products of spiritual machines, bionic land animals, bionic plants and underwater animals which have integrated core AI technologies, and the projects under research, jobs opportunities and potential collaborations.

Bio: Dr Chunlin Ji is the co-founder and vice president of Kuang-Chi Institute of Advanced Technology in Shenzhen, China. He received his BSc Degree from Northeast University in 2003. After that, he got his MSc from Cambridge University and Ph.D from Duke University in 2009. He then became a research fellow at Harvard University. His research field covers from Bayesian statistics, metamaterial design to communication, and now into robotics and AI. Currently, together with his R&D team, he has developed a lot of products such as bionic animals and bionic plants. He is also a trustee of many AI companies and is responsible for the technology part. He has published more than 60 papers and been invited to many conferences in China. He has received several awards, including Special Allowance from the Shenzhen Municipal Government, Shenzhen Overseas High-Caliber Personnel and National Level, Leading Talents in Shenzhen.

Dimitrios Giakoumis, Senior Research Associate, Centre for Research and Technology, Greece

The RAMCIP project: Developing a service robot for MCI patients at home

Dr. Dimitrios Giakoumis will talk about the Robotic Assistant for MCI Patients at home (RAMCIP) – the rationale, motivation and vision for the project, as well as innovations, use cases and the current status of the RAMCIP robot.

Bio: Dr. Dimitrios Giakoumis is a Senior Research Associate in the Information Technologies Institute of CERTH. He received the Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering, the M.Sc. in Advanced Computing and Communication Systems and the Ph.D. in Human – Computer Interaction through Affective Interfaces in 2006, 2008 and 2012 respectively, from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. His main research interests include affective computing, robotic perception and cognition, computer vision, human motion, activity and behaviour analysis and modelling, signal processing and sensor management, multimodal interfaces and pattern recognition. His involvement in these areas has led to co-authoring of more than 35 papers in refereed journals, international conferences and book chapters. He has served as reviewer for a series of scientific journals, including the IEEE Transactions in Biomedical Engineering, Elsevier Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine, Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine (Hindawi, guest editor of the special issue “Advances in Computational Psychometrics”), the Computer journal (Oxford), the EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing and Universal Access in the Information Society (Springer), as well as for international conferences; he was the Technical Program Chair of the 5th International Symposium on Pervasive Computing Paradigms for Mental Health (MindCare 2015). He is with CERTH-ITI since 2007 and has been involved in several FP6, FP7 and H2020 R&D projects, as well as in national projects. He is the Quality Assurance Manager of the Horizon2020 RAMCIP project.

Zen Koh, Managing Director, Hocoma Asia Pacific, Singapore

Clinical Application of NeuroRehabilitation Robotics

Patients with movement disorder after a damage of the central nervous system can achieve improvement in walking or hand function through intensive, task-specific, and highly repetitive functional training. After a stroke or a spinal cord injury (SCI), neuronal centres at and below the level of lesion exhibit plasticity that can be exploited by functional training paradigms that include assisting stepping or hand/arm movements of the affected side. This session discuss the successful clinical application of robotic devices in the neurorehabilitation for stroke/SCI subjects. Neural mechanisms, afferent feedback, and functional training, for gait and hand/arm movements recovery after stroke/SCI, will be discussed. Findings from selected clinical studies will also be presented covering the feasibility and efficacy of robot-assisted training using the LokomatPro and Armeo Therapy Concept.

Bio: Zen has extensive experience in providing leadership and management for organisations that provide medical devices, health care solutions and services for people with disabilities, and consults regularly with executives from a variety of fields to help create synergistic solutions. Prior to his current position, he was the Assistant Executive (ACE) for the Singapore National Cooperative Federation (SNCF), which is the apex body for cooperatives in Singapore supporting more than 1.7 million members with total assets of more than S$1.3 billion. He has successfully initiated and launched, as CEO of START Centre, the inaugural International Convention for Rehabilitation Engineering & Assistive Technology in 2007 with Her Royal Highness, Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn & Dr Vivian Balakrishnan, the then Minister of Community Development, Youth and Sports as Guest of Honour and Keynote Speakers. Under his leadership, START Centre was awarded the EDB locally based Enterprise Advancement Program on 1st July 2006, receiving fund of up to S$750K, to be the multiplier to promote healthcare, Assistive & Rehabilitative Technology industry for people with disabilities regionally. In June 2012, Zen was nominated by the MD+DI amongst the 40 under 40, future most influential industry leaders in medtech, who are developing novel technologies and leading companies that will transform future healthcare system.

Paul Tan, Co-Director, ST Engineering-NTU Corporate Lab, Singapore

Managing Demand-driven R&D in Corporate Labs for Successful Translation into Industries

Lately, there has been a resurgence of interest in the engineering and technology communities in setting up corporate Research Labs in universities. Although Corporate Labs are not a new concept, the current setups need to be attuned to the exponential pace which technology transformation is taking place today and be more application-oriented to achieve impactful outcomes. To address the opportunities afforded by emerging technologies such as advanced robotics, IoT, artificial intelligence and autonomous systems, this talk aims to share a framework that will allow companies and universities to jointly undertake effective R&D Project Management practices, customer-stakeholder engagement, team development and realistic test-proofing of R&D results in the real world. The purpose is to share some good practices that will help expedite the translation of R&D outcomes to actual commercial application.

Bio: Paul is the Vice President of Technology Development at ST Dynamics - a company in the ST Engineering Group and he also assumes the role of co-Director for the ST Engineering-NTU Robotics Corporate Lab. He has been in the field of engineering for more than twenty years, including sectors such as aerospace, robotics, unmanned vehicles and intelligent systems and is actively involved in the management of advanced R&D in these fields within the company. His current focus is in driving advanced robotics and autonomous systems in the airport and crisis response sectors and believes that there is much opportunity in applying the latest technologies to enhance the operations and safety in these areas.

Jia Hui Pang, Systems Engineer, ST Aerospace, Singapore

Automated Aircraft Inspection Using Unmanned Aerial Systems

During aircraft maintenance, visual inspections are carried out to determine the location and severity of defects, such as cracks, dents, buckles, etc. that may be found on the aircraft bodies. These activities are traditionally done manually, and can be labour-intensive, time consuming, expensive and dangerous to perform. This presentation explores the use of a small, multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for automated aircraft inspection in a proof-of-concept trial, and takes a closer look at the key technologies that can be used to enable the UAV to fly autonomously and safely around the aircraft in both indoor and outdoor environments, and to detect and classify defects on the aircraft bodies automatically from the images captured by the UAV.

Bio: Jia Hui is a system engineer with Singapore Technologies Aerospace Ltd. He has eight years of experience designing and developing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and ground control stations (GCSs) for both military and commercial applications. He graduated from National University of Singapore (NUS) with a Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering, and specialises in electronic, embedded and control system design.

Simon See, Director, Nvidia Technology Center and Solution Architect and Engineering, Asia Pacific and Japan, Nvidia, Singapore

Accelerator for AI Computing

The application of Artificial intelligence has been growing exponentially in recent times. This is due to three major facts: availability of data, new algorithms, and democratisation of high-performance computing. In this talk, Dr Simon See will discuss how HPC can help to accelerate the development of new AI algorithm.

Bio: Dr Simon See is currently the Director and Chief Solutions Architect of NVIDIA Asia Pacific Professional Solution Group. He is also a Professor at the Shanghai Jiaotong University (China) and King-Mong Kung Technical University in Thailand. He is also the Chief Scientific Computing Advisor to BGI (China). Dr See graduated from the University of Salford with a Doctorate degree in Applied Mathematics/Engineering. Prior to joining NVIDIA, he worked for DSO National Lab, IBM, SGI and Sun Microsystems. His research interests are in Computer Architecture and Systems, Simulation and Applied Mathematics. He has published 70+ peer reviewed papers.

Lakmal Seneviratne, Associate Provost of Research and Graduate Studies & Professor of Robotics, Khalifa University, UAE

Role of Competitions in Technology Innovations in Robots

Robotics is a powerful technology with the potential to have a disruptive economic and societal impact. This has resulted in continuing recent major investments in robotics, in anticipation of new market opportunities related to next generation robotics. Many of these new opportunities will require robots to work in crowded, unstructured and dynamic environments, in close proximity to and in collaboration with humans. They will also require the robots to physically interact with the environment, cope with uncertainty, operate with increased autonomy, while maintaining safety. These unsolved robotics problems have also given rise to an increasing number of global robotics competitions. Competitions have the potential to accelerate innovations, provide application focused solutions, while calibrating the gap between expectations and reality. We will review and discuss the role of international competitions in catalyzing future technological innovations in Robotics.

Bio: Lakmal Seneviratne is the founding Director of the Robotics Institute, Associate VP for Research and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Khalifa University, UAE. He is also the Technical Director of the Mohammed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge. Prior to joining Khalifa University, he was Professor of Mechatronics, the founding Director of the Centre for Robotics Research and the Head of the Division of Engineering, at King’s College London. His main research interests are centred on robotics and automation, with particular emphasis on increasing the autonomy of robotic systems interacting with complex dynamic environments. He has published over 350 peer reviewed publications on these topics.