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SUMMARY:Learning to control an elephant trunk robot
DTSTART:20141013T140000
DTSTAMP:20260408T105207Z
UID:7566cf6da2d67e7034851520d864173b39c7984e1bd91edc385d0be6
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Prof. Jochen Steil\, University of Bielefeld\, Germany\nThe Ne
 w Scientist: "I am in Jochen Steil's lab\, grasping a segmented\, whiplash
 ing tentacle that resists and tries to push me away.\n"It feels strangely 
 alive\, as though I am trying to throttle a giant alien maggot. In fact\, 
 I am training a bionic elephant's trunk to do real-world jobs like picking
  apples or replacing light bulbs – something non-experts haven't been ab
 le to do until now." - Paul Marks\, 13.03.2014\nThis talk presents the sci
 entific work behind this experience with the futuristic bionic handling as
 sistant (BHA) soft robot\, which indeed was modelled after an elephant's t
 runk by its producer FESTO. The BHA is a large-scale pneumatically operate
 d\, flexible\, soft and compliant continuum robot\, which is inherently sa
 fe to interact with.\nHowever\, the BHA comes without an automatic control
  system and its soft material and complex dynamics prevents simple modelin
 g\, simulation\, identification or standard control. We show  how to use 
 advanced learning methods to establish a proper mixture of adaptive contro
 llers\, approximations\, and autonomous exploration for this challenging p
 latform. Bound together by means of a coherent software architecture\, thi
 s enables the BHA to perform actual grasping tasks\, kinesthetic teaching\
 , and accelarated online-learning in physical interaction\, which creates 
 the experience described above.\nBio: Prof. Jochen Steil is the Managing D
 irector of the Research Institute for Cognition and Robotics (CoR-Lab) and
  apl. Professor for Neuroinformatics at the Faculty of Technology\, Univer
 sity of Bielefeld. He received his diploma in Mathematics and doctorate in
  "Input-Output stability of Recurrent Neural Networks" from the Bielefeld 
 University and later worked as a principal scientist at the Honda Research
  Institute Europe and as Managing Director of DFG Cluster for Cognitive In
 teraction Technology (CITEC). He has been part of EU projects ECHORD and C
 ODEFOR and served as project coordinator for the AMARSI project. He is a r
 ecipient of the ZiF research group fellowship. His current research intere
 sts include cognitive and humanoid robotics\, developmental and autonomous
  motor learning\, visual online learning\, modeling of visual attention\, 
 learning and stability in recurrent networks\, nonlinear dynamics.
LOCATION:MEB110 http://plan.epfl.ch/?lang=fr&room=MEB110
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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