[AllUsers-ISR] Seminar Tomorrow: Towards Autonomous Collaborative Tasks in Robotics

[Paulo Menezes]

Dear All,

Tomorrow Prof. Wael Suleiman from the University of Sherbrooke in Canada will kindly present a seminar tomorrow Friday (8 September 2023) at 3pm in ISR Auditorium. 

Below the information.

Kind regards,

Paulo Menezes

TITLE: Towards Autonomous Collaborative Tasks in Robotics

ABSTRACT:

Multi-robot and human-robot cooperative tasks are exciting and challenging research fields in robotics. In this talk, I will give an overview of our research activities related to cooperative tasks at the University of Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada. 
First, I will talk about autonomous navigation strategies and control that we developed for two humanoid robots transporting an object.  
Subsequently, I will give some insights into some of our ongoing research concerning intuitive and physical human-robot interaction. I will provide an outline of a set of design rules that we proposed for generating intuitive touch semantics called the “two-touch kinematic chain paradigm”. This method interprets user touch intentions to allow motions ranging from low-level single-joint control to high-level whole-body task control with posture generation, stepping, and walking. Furthermore, I shall expound upon our recent work on vision- and tactile-based continuous multimodal intention and attention recognition. In this work, a supervised machine learning algorithm is trained to classify whether a touch is intentional or not by combining touch location, human pose, and gaze direction. I shall share the outcomes of experiments conducted on an array of research robots, including Nao, HRP-4, and Baxter. 

BIO: 

Wael Suleiman received the Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in automatic control from Paul Sabatier University, Toulouse, France, in 2004 and 2008, respectively. From 2008 to 2010, he held a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) at JRL, Tsukuba. 
He joined the University of Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada, in 2011, where he is now Full Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Faculty of Engineering. His research interests include humanoid and collaborative robots, motion planning and control, numerical optimization, and system identification.