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Keynote Speaker-ICACR 2020

Prof. Alicia Casals, Technical University of Catalonia, Spain

Speech Title: Autonomy and cooperation in surgical robotics. Application related issues

Abstract: The growing trend of using robots in surgery is due to the increasing capabilities of robots in aspects like improving precision and accessibility, but the future moves more and more towards increasing the capabilities of acting more intelligently and rely on robots to plan and execute some actions autonomously. The clinical scenarios in surgery are quite diverse and thus presenting very different requirements. Diversity comes both, from the anatomical parts involved: eyes, bones, organs, etc. and from the required actuation on them: cannulation, implanting prosthesis, needle-based therapies, etc. Therefore, the potential of robotics varies accordingly. This keynote will overview present achievements and foresee an overview of future surgical robotics.

Biography: Alicia Casals received the graduate degree in electrical and electronic engineering from the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC). She received the PhD degree in computer vision from UPC. She has been a professor with UPC since 1990, in the Automatic Control and Computer Engineering Department. She is currently leading the research group on robotics and vision of the Centre of Research in Biomedical Engineering (CREB-UPC) and is an associate researcher with the Institute for Biomedical Engineering of Catalonia (IBEC). Her research field is in robotic systems and control strategies for rehabilitation, assistance, and surgical applications. From her research, she is co-founder of two spin-off companies, RobSurgical Systems (2012) and Surgitrainer (2015). She has held several responsibilities in IEEE RAS and in European networks, being at present president of the EMBS Technical Committee on Biorobotics. Since 2007, she is a member of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans and the Academy of Catalonia. She is a senior member of the IEEE.

 

Prof. J. A. Tenreiro Machado, Polytechnic of Porto, Portugal

Speech Title: Fractional Calculus: Fundamentals and Applications

Abstract: Fractional Calculus (FC) started in 1695 with Leibniz discussing the meaning of Dⁿy for n = 1/2. Starting with the ideas of Leibniz many important mathematicians developed the theoretical concepts, but the area remained somewhat unknown from applied sciences. By the beginning of the twentieth century Olivier Heaviside applied FC in the electrical engineering, but, the visionary and important contributions were forgotten. During the eighties FC emerged associated with phenomena such as fractal and chaos and, consequently, in nonlinear dynamical. In the last years, FC become 'new' and popular tool for the modelling of complex dynamical systems. This lecture introduces the FC fundamental concepts and presents several applications in distinct areas of science and engineering with particular attention to data analysis, modelling and control.

Biography: J. A. Tenreiro Machado was born at 1957 and graduated with PhD (1989) and 'Habilitation' (1995), in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Porto. He is presently Principal Coordinator Professor at the Dept. of Electrical Engineering, Institute of Engineering, Polytechnic of Porto, Portugal. He published 111 chapters of books, 431 papers in journals, 369 papers in conferences, 4 books in Portuguese, 6 books in English. Editor of 18 books. Editor-in-Chief of Handbook of fractional calculus with applications. Guest-Editor of 50 special issues in journals. Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Vibration Testing and System Dynamics, Mathematics. Editor of Entropy. Associate Editor of Nonlinear Dynamics, Int. J. of Bifurcation and Chaos, Fractional Calculus and Applied Analysis, J. of Vibration and Control, Int. J. of Nonlinear Sciences and Numerical Simulation, Applied Mathematical Modelling, Computational and Applied Mathematics, Acta Polytechnica Hungarica, and others. Google Scholar, h-index=66, citations: 22991. Scopus, h-index=50, citations: 11325. Web of Science, Clarivate Analytics, h-index=45, citations: 10178. Highly cited researcher cross-field 2019. Top reviewer in mathematics 2019. Top reviewer in cross-field 2019. His research interests include: Complex systems, Nonlinear Dynamics, Fractional Calculus, Modelling, Entropy, Control, Data series analysis, Biomathematics, Evolutionary Computing, Genomics, and Mechatronics.

 

Assoc. Prof. Jan Faigl, Faculty of Electrical Engineering (FEE), Czech Technical University (CTU), Czech Republic

Speech Title: Multi-goal Planning in Data Collection Missions with Autonomous Mobile Robots

Abstract: In robotic data collection missions, autonomous robots are employed as mobile units collecting the phenomenon information by visiting requested locations where measurements are collected to build a studied phenomenon model. Finding a cost-efficient path to visit a set of locations is a variant of the combinatorial traveling salesman problem studied as a multi-goal planning problem in robotics. The main challenges of such robotic routing problems are related to additional constraints the solution has to satisfy to be feasible for mobile robots. Therefore, suitable problem formulations are studied with further problem generalizations to find better mission plans performed by particular data collection robots.
Selected approaches developed in the Computational Robotics Laboratory will be presented during the talk. The laboratory is a part of the Artificial Intelligence Center and Center for Robotics and Autonomous Systems at the Czech Technical University in Prague, Czechia. Within the lab, we address robotic information gathering with aerial and ground robotic platforms. The talk will present fundamental data collection planning approaches formulated as robotic variants of routing problems to find cost-efficient solutions with curvature-constrained multi-goal trajectories. An overview of existing methods with a solution quality guarantee will be presented with practical approaches for quick solutions to generalized problems and multi-vehicle scenarios. The focus will be on methods that can exploit the non-zero sensing range to save travel costs and improve mission performance. The introduced problems and proposed solutions will be accompanied by reports on experimental field deployments, showing practical applicability of the methods. Furthermore, challenges related to robotic information gathering with online learning of the travel cost using incremental learning approaches will be presented and demonstrated for deployments of multi-legged walking robots. Finally, the talk will also present recent results in deployments of autonomous data collection robots in subterranean environments motivated by the DARPA Subterranean Challenge (SubT) and achievements of the CTU-CRAS-NORLAB team.

Biography: Assoc. Prof. Jan Faigl received Ing. degree in Electrical Engineering, branch Technical Cybernetics, Faculty of Electrical Engineering (FEE), Czech Technical University (CTU), Czechia in 2003 and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, branch Artificial Intelligence and Biocybernetics, FEE, CTU, Czechia in 2010. He was a member of the winning team for the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC) in Challenge 3 and the 2nd place in Challenge 1. In 2019, he participated in Tunnel Circuit event of the DARPA SubT Challenge as member of the CTU-CRAS team that took the 1st place in DARPA non-funded teams and the 3rd place among all the teams. He has served as Program Committee member in several conferences, chairs of workshops and served as the guest editor of the special issue on "Online decision making in Multi-Robot Coordination" in Autonomous Robots journal. He currently serves as the associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (T-ASE). Since 2013, he is leading the Computational Robotics Laboratory (https://comrob.fel.cvut.cz) within the Artificial Intelligence Center (https://aic.fel.cvut.cz). He is also co-founder of the Center for Robotics and Autonomous Systems (https://robotics.fel.cvut.cz). Dr. Faigl had been awarded the Antonin Svoboda Award from the Czech Society for Cybernetics and Informatics in 2011. He received best poster awards for IJCNN 2017, WSOM'16, and WSOM'14, best student paper award WSOM'19, and be the finalist of the best paper awards at RSS'18 and IROS'16. His current research interests include multi-goal planning, robotic information gathering, and robotic systems for autonomous long-term missions with life-long learning, which also comprises unsupervised learning, self-organizing systems, autonomous navigation, aerial systems, and path and motion planning techniques, robotic learning and locomotion control of multi-legged walking robots.