L-CAS and LIAT are jointly organising two research seminars by visiting academics, open to anyone interested.

Dr Mario Gianni (U Plymouth): Urban Search And Rescue Robotics: An In-Field Experience

Date/Time: Tue, 28/8/2018, 11:00

Room: DCB1103

Abstract

On June 2012, at Mirandola, a city of Northern Italy, hit by a tremendous earthquake, I supported the deployment of a team of humans and robots to assess damage to historical buildings and cultural artefacts located therein.

On September 1, 2016, I worked in a team which deployed two ground and three aerial robots in Amatrice, Italy, to assist the response after the 6.2-magnitude earthquake, which hit and devastated the town on August 24 2016, killing 234 people.

From these two in-field experiences, I learnt that robots have really the potentials to assist responders in searching for survivors, in rescuing victims, in providing the responders with situation awareness, in creating references of the destroyed environment, in sampling suspicious substances from sites, in reaching areas that are inaccessible for humans.

In this talk, I’m going to present the research work carried out aiming at achieving these goals.

In particular, I’ll discuss the challenges and present the proposed solutions concerning building and maintaining a persistent representation of the environment, planning safe motions and controlling multi-degree-of-freedom mobile robots.

These capabilities are paramount to prevent rescue robots to get stuck in rubble-filled environments.

Florian Lier (U Bielefeld): Tackling Reproducibility in Robotics

Date/Time: Thu, 30/8/2018, 11:00

Room: DCB1103

Florian will be talking about his recent works on ensuring reproducibility in robotics research, the infrastructure and systems he has developed to facilitate this. He will share some experience from building robotic systems, including his recent RoboCup@Home Pepper robot system, the winner of this year’s RoboCup@Home WorldCup in Montreal.