Research Issues on Interactive Robots at Home and Hospitals

The considerable growth of research and development on service robots in recent years has led to an increasingly fine-grained resolution of this application area, splitting it into more specific domains. Among those are robot systems that operate at home and hospitals, helping humans with their daily chores. Those systems must be interactive, so as to make them easier to use, and social, to improve their acceptability. Such requirements raise several interesting research issues, including human-aware and multimodal navigation, speech and natural language understanding, vision-based mobile grasping and manipulation, object recognition and semantic mapping, reasoning under uncertain knowledge, sequential decision-making under uncertainty, as well as design and execution of socially acceptable behaviours.
In this talk I will describe different robot systems we have been developing that integrate many of these subsystems, describing the involved research challenges and demonstrating them at work in realistic scenarios, including robot competitions.


Pedro U. Lima received the Licenciatura (5 years) and M.Sc degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from IST in 1984 and 1989, respectively, and the Ph.D. (1994) in Electrical Engineering from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, NY, USA, where he was also a researcher in the CIRSSE NASA Center. Currently, he is a Full Professor at IST, Universidade de Lisboa, where he coordinates the MSc Program on Electrical and Computer Engineering (the largest MSc Program at IST) and a researcher of the Institute for Systems and Robotics, where he is the Coordinator of the Intelligent Robots and Systems group and Deputy President for Scientific Matters.
His research interests lie in the areas of formation control, cooperative perception, discrete event models of robot tasks and planning under uncertainty, with applications to multi-robot and networked robot systems. He as advised successfully 16 PhD students (including 4 under the IST/EPFL Joint Doctoral Initiative) and was the co-advisor of another 2.
Pedro has been the PI of several European and national research projects at ISR/IST and he has been very active in robot competitions. He is a Trustee of the RoboCup Federation, was the General Chair of RoboCup2004, held in Lisbon and the Coordinator of the FP7 Coordination Action RoCKIn. He currently serves as Coordinator of Indoor competitions of the European Robotics League, and as member of the Technical Advisory Committee of the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC).