Session 1
Toshio Fukuda
23 June 2021, 9.00 a.m. (GMT +8)

AI Robots and Moon Shot Program

There are many ways to make research and development of intelligent robotic systems. Prof. Fukuda has been working on the Multi-scale robotics systems for many years, based on the Cellular Robotics System, which is the basic concept of the emergence of intelligence in the multi-scale way from Organizational Level, Distributed robotics to Biological Cell engineering and Nano-robotics. It consists of many elements how the system can be structured from the individual to the group/society levels in analogy with the biological system.

Focusing on the coevolution and self organization capabilities, Prof. Fukuda will show a new initiative on AI and Robot, one of the Moon Shot Programs started by Japanese Government, since 2020. Based on the Society 5.0, it is a new and challenging program aiming at the AI robotic system in 2050. Prof. Fukuda will introduce some of the projects in this program for realization of the Society 5.0 by back-casting technologies from the 2050 to the current ones.

About the Speaker

Toshio Fukuda is Professor Emeritus of Nagoya University and Professor of Meijo University and Waseda University. He is mainly engaging in the research fields of intelligent robotic system, micro and nano robotics, bio-robotic system and industry applications in robotics and automation. He was the President of IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (1998-1999), and IEEE President (2020). He was Editor-in-Chief of IEEE/ASME Trans. Mechatronics (2000-2002). He was chairs of many conferences, such as the Founding General Chair of IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS, 1988), IEEE Conference on Cyborg and Bionic Systems (CBS, 2017), IEEE Conference on Intelligence and Safety of Robots (ISR, 2018). He has received many awards such as IEEE Robotics and Automation Pioneer Award (2004), IEEE Robotics and Automation Technical Field Award (2010). IEEE Fellow (1995). SICE Fellow (1995). JSME Fellow (2002), RSJ Fellow (2004), VRSJ Fellow (2011).

Session 2
Robin Murphy
24 June 2021, 9.00 a.m. (GMT +8)

Robots and COVID-19: Lessons for the Future of Autonomous Systems

This talk will describe how ground, aerial, and marine robots have been used in disasters, most recently the coronavirus pandemic. During the pandemic so far, 338 instances of robots in 48 countries protecting healthcare workers from unnecessary exposure, handling the surge in demand for clinical care, preventing infections, restoring economic activity, and maintaining individual quality of life have been reported. The uses span six sociotechnical work domains and 29 different use cases representing different missions, robot work envelopes, morphologies, styles of autonomy, and human-robot interaction dyads. The dataset also confirms a model of adoption of robotics technology for disasters. Adoption favors robots that maximize the suitability for established use cases while minimizing risk of malfunction, hidden workload costs, or unintended consequences as measured by the NASA Technical Readiness Assessment metrics. Regulations do not present a major barrier but availability, either in terms of inventory or prohibitively high costs, does. The model suggests that in order to be prepared for future events, roboticists should partner with responders now, investigate how to rapidly manufacture complex, reliable robots on demand, and conduct fundamental research on predicting and mitigating risk in extreme or novel environments.

About the Speaker

Dr. Robin R. Murphy is the Raytheon Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University, a TED speaker, and an IEEE and ACM Fellow. She helped create the fields of disaster robotics and human-robot interaction, deploying robots to 29 disasters in five countries including the 9/11 World Trade Center, Fukushima, the Syrian boat refugee crisis, Hurricane Harvey, and the Kilauea volcanic eruption. Murphy’s contributions to robotics have been recognized with the ACM Eugene L. Lawler Award for Humanitarian Contributions, a US Air Force Exemplary Civilian Service Award medal, the AUVSI Foundation’s Al Aube Award, and the Motohiro Kisoi Award for Rescue Engineering Education (Japan). She has written the best-selling textbook Introduction to AI Robotics (2nd edition 2019) and the award-winning Disaster Robotics (2014), plus serving an editor for the science fiction/science fact focus series for the journal Science Robotics. She co-chaired the White House OSTP and NSF workshops on robotics for infectious diseases and recently co-chaired the National Academy of Engineering/Computing Community Consortium workshop on robots for COVID-19.

Session 3
Tamim Asfour
24 June 2021, 2.20 p.m. (GMT +8)

Towards a Robotics AI - Engineering Humanoid Robots that Empower Humans

The goal of humanoid robotics research is understanding human performance and intelligence to build versatile systems that assist and empower humans in a wide variety of tasks. Research in this area range from building anthropomorphic robots to endowing them with sensorimotor and cognitive abilities to serve humans at home and at work. Such robots must integrate perception and action to generate intelligent behavior for interacting with the real world. The talk will describe recent work aimed at increasing robots’ autonomy and creating a symbiotic human-robot interaction to create truly AI robots. In particular, the talk will address affordance-based grasping, learning semantic scene manipulation based on visual perception and natural language instructions, episodic memory as key component of a cognitive robot architecture for encoding and retrieval of experienced events or performed activities occurring at a particular time, place and context. I will showcase experiments with the ARMAR humanoid robots performing tasks in household environments daily and manipulating contaminated objects in hazardous environments. The talk will conclude with a discussion of challenges and open problems in Robotics AI.

About the Speaker

Tamim Asfour is full Professor of Humanoid Robotics at the Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany. His research focuses on the engineering of high performance 24/7 humanoid robotics. In particular, he studies the mechano-informatics of humanoids as the synergetic integration of informatics, artificial intelligence, and mechatronics into complete humanoid robot systems, which are able to predict, act, interact, and learn in the real world. Tamim is the developer of the ARMAR humanoid robot family. He has been a visiting professor at Georgia Tech, at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, and at the National University of Singapore. He is the scientific spokesperson of the KIT Center “Information · Systems · Technologies” (KCIST), the president of the Executive Board of the German Robotics Society (DGR), the Founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE-RAS Humanoids Conference Editorial Board, and the deputy Editor-in-Chief and Editor of the Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L).

Session 4
Peter Corke
25 June 2021, 1.00 p.m. (GMT +8)

Creating robots that see

This talk will define and motivate the problem of robotic vision, the challenges as well as recent progress at the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision. This includes component technologies such as novel cameras, deep learning for computer vision, transfer learning for manipulation, evaluation methodologies, and also end-to-end systems for applications such as logistics, agriculture, environmental remediation and asset inspection.

About the Speaker

Peter Corke is a robotics researcher and educator. He is the distinguished professor of robotic vision at Queensland University of Technology, director of the QUT Centre for Robotics, and former director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision. He is the Chief Scientist at Dorabot and on the advisory boards of Emesent and LYRO Robotics. His research is concerned with enabling robots to see, and the application of robots to mining, agriculture and environmental monitoring. He created widely used open-source software for teaching and research, wrote the bestselling textbook “Robotics, Vision, and Control”, created several MOOCs and the Robot Academy, and has won national and international recognition for teaching including 2017 Australian University Teacher of the Year. He is a fellow of the IEEE, the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering, the Australian Academy of Science; founding editor of the Journal of Field Robotics; founding multi-media editor of the International Journal of Robotics Research; member of the editorial advisory board of the Springer Tracts on Advanced Robotics series; former editor-in-chief of the IEEE Robotics & Automation magazine and member of the executive editorial board member of the International Journal of Robotics Research; the recipient of the Qantas/Rolls-Royce and Australian Engineering Excellence awards; and has held visiting positions at Oxford, University of Illinois, Carnegie-Mellon University and University of Pennsylvania. He received his undergraduate and masters degrees in electrical engineering and PhD from the University of Melbourne.