Thursday 13 September 2018

Open positions at the MoreLab

Postdoctoral fellowship, PhD and Master scholarship are available at the Morelab.org, Canada

Position 1: High-level Perception for Human-robot Interaction and Collaboration
Good knowledge in computer vision/robot vision is required. Practical experience in sensor fusion and data association is plus.

Position 2: Socially Capable Mobile Robot Navigation
Good knowledge in robot perception, path planning, motion planning and control is required. A strong background in algorithms is plus. Hands-on skills of system integration are highly expected.

Position 3: Deep Reinforcement Learning for Socially aware Robot Navigation
Fundamental knowledge in machine learning for robotics is required. Practical experience of applied AI in robotics and autonomous systems is highly expected.

Position 4: Multi-robot Systems/Swarm Robotics
Solid background in Math and Control Theory is required. Algorithmic thinking and programming skills are required for this project. 

You can find demonstrations of our research projects at:
https://www.youtube.com/user/TheMoreThanOne/videos

PhD and Master applicants with background in Engineering and Computer Science (Robotics, Control Engineering, Robot Vision and AI) are welcome. Good knowledge in Math
and practical experience in Computer Programming are required. Hands-on skills in ROS and Matlab are highly expected.

Admission requirements for PhD and Master students: English score (IELTS >= 7.0 or TOELF>= 100) and high GPA (>75%) of your degree(s). 

Feel free to contact the lab director (morelab.org@gmail.com) for more information. Please send your CV, degrees and transcripts, samples of your research work along with a research statement to express your interests in a position.

Friday 11 May 2018

Workshop on Robotic Co-workers 4.0: Human Safety and Comfort in Human-Robot Interactive Social Environments, IROS2018

Website: https://sites.google.com/site/humansafetyandcomfortiros2018/home

Aim and Objectives
Professional and personal service robots are becoming enabling assistive technologies for social interactive environments. However, the first and the most challenging issue with respect to deploying service robots in human populated environments is how to guarantee human safety and comfort in human-robot shared workspaces. Human physical safety is concerned with how to maintain the minimum physical distance between robots and humans, while human psychological comfort implies that robots should not cause stress and discomfort to humans when working with or around them. Human risks and their inconveniences when working in an interactive social environment essentially come from unavoidable situations due to robot malfunctioning operations caused by either misunderstanding and misinterpreting information extracted from sensing and perception or failures of path planning and motion control. Furthermore, humans may feel uncomfortable as well as fear and stress towards service robots as such robots do not behave in the natural way of humans with respect to their social situations, contexts, and cultures. It is important to find out a methodological approach of incorporating social signals, cues, and norms into sensing, perception, path planning, and motion control of the robot control architectureso that the robots capable of securing human physical safety and ensuring psychological comfort when interacting and cooperating with humans in human-robot shared work spaces
The primary objective of this workshop is to create an open interactive forum for researchers, engineers, developers and entrepreneurs of professional and personal service robots as well as psychologists and sociologists who are interested in the impacts of robotics and AI. Our goal is to gather speakers and an audience from multiple disciplines to discuss about challenges and methodologies of how to guarantee human safety and comfort in order to accelerate deployment of service robots into human-robot shared work spaces. Last but not least, through this workshop, we aim to deliver our main message to all the targeted audience that human safety and comfort must be critically considered because it is one of the most important issues we must address in order to deploy robotic co-workers in human-robot shared work spaces, especially when human society is moving towards cyber-societies in which humans and robots will harmoniously live and work together.

Topics of interest
This half-day workshop aims to generate an interactive forum for researchers who are interested in human safety and comfort in human-robot shared workplaces. We are committed to open-end discussions on all aspects of guaranteeing human safety and comfort in human-robot interactive social environments with, but not limited to, the following topics: 
  • Current state-of-the-art in human safety and comfort in interactive social environments
  • New hardware and software design for human safety and comfort
  • System design and integration for human safety and comfort 
  • Safety rules for human safety in human-robot shared workspaces 
  • Ethics for human safety and comfort
  • Human detection and tracking techniques in shared environments
  • Human face and body detection and tracking
  • Human gestures and posture recognition 
  • Human-object interaction and human-robot handover detection and tracking 
  • Human group interaction detection and tracking 
  • Sensor fusion techniques to extract social cues and signals 
  • Learning algorithms for interpretation of social signals and cues in contexts 
  • Human aware robot navigation techniques 
  • Robot navigation in dynamic social environments
  • Robot avoiding and approaching techniques 
  • Human-robot interaction in close proximity 
  • Path planning and motion planning for mobile service robots in social environments 
  • Control engineering applied for services mobile robots
  • Real-time control and optimization of robot operations in social environments
  • Applications of mobile service robots in social environment

Co-organizers

Rachid Alami, LAAS-CNRS, TMBI, Univ. Toulouse, France (Rachid.Alami@laas.fr)
Takayuki Kanda,  Kyoto University, Japan (kanda@atr.jp)
Goldie Nejat, University of Toronto, Canada (nejat@mie.utoronto.ca)
Yongsheng Ou, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Science, China (ys.ou@siat.ac.cn)
Xuan Tung Truong, University of Prince Edward Island, Canada (xuantung.truong@gmail.com)
Trung Dung Ngo, The More-Than-One Robotics Laboratory, Faculty of Sustainable Design Engineering, University of Prince Edward Island (tngo@upei.ca)

Wednesday 3 January 2018

A Special Issue on Open-Source Electronics Platforms: Development and Applications

We are organizing a special issue on Open-Source Electronics Platforms - Development and Applications.

Scope: 
Open-source electronics platforms are becoming very popular in our daily activities. Arduino- and Raspberry-compatible modules have been applied for a wide range of applications from do-it-yourself (DIY) to industrial projects. Using open-source electronics platforms as educational tools for teaching engineering and science at universities is undeniable. Influences of open-source electronics platforms in technological renovations and social impacts have been well recognized.

The aim of this Special Issue is to gather the most recent development and applications of open-source electronics platforms. We invite all papers with novel contributions in principles, development and applications of open-source electronics platforms with, but not limited to, the following topics.
  • Current state of the art of open-source electronics platforms
  • Principles and development of open-source electronics platforms
  • Software frameworks and operating systems for open-source electronics platforms
  • Using open-source electronics platforms to develop modern information systems including IoT, cyber-physical systems, sensor networks, automation, and robotics.
  • Usability of open-source electronics platforms in research and education
Keywords:
  • Hardware platforms
  • Software frameworks
  • Free operating systems
  • Open-source drivers and firmware
  • Communication protocols
  • Internet of Things
  • Cyber-physical systems
  • Sensor networks
  • Robotics
  • Automation
  • Educational tools
  • Engineering and science education
  • Do-it-yourself (DIY) projects
  • High-level research projects
Deadline for manuscript submission: October 31 2018