NSERC - DISCOVERY GRANT & DND SUPPLEMENT GRANT

Dr. Ngo successfully renewed his NSERC-Discovery Grant. He also received DND supplement award - a prestigious award from the Department of National Defence, Canada. 

Thanks to the financial support from NSERC and DND, Dr. Ngo is hiring a number of graduate students. If you are interested in joining his lab, you should contact him via morelab.org@gmail.com . 

Dr. Ngo's Talks and Seminars at International Institutions

Dr. Ngo recently visited research labs and colleagues at universities and research institutes in Hong Kong, China, Vietnam, and Australia. He gave a number of talks and seminars and here a only a few examples:

Soft Tactile Sensor-based Swarm Navigation at City University of Hong Kong

A Kangaroo-inspired Large-scale Swarm of Mobile Robots as the First Responder in Emergency

How to make mobile robots become counterparts in our daily lives?

Publications

Beyond Shared Autonomy: Joint Perception and Action for Human-in-the-Loop Mobile Robot Navigation Systems

Soft Robotic Hand for Sushi Grasping and Handling

A joint publication at TMECH

A joint publication between Soft Haptics Lab - JAIST and Morelab.org - UPEI was accepted to appear on the IEEE Transaction on Mechatronics (T-MECH). Congratulations to Nhat and Duy. 

ViART: Vision-Based Soft Tactile Sensing for Autonomous Robot Vehicles

MSc Graduation - Hamed Bozorgi

Hamed successfully defended his Master thesis. His result was exceptional as evaluated by the examination board. Congratulations, Hamed.

Hamed also won a number of special awards for his MSc thesis and MSc program.

- FSDE GSC Oustanding Graduation

- Governor General Canada's Academic Gold Medal 

- CSME Gold Medal

Hamed has secured an industrial job at Cyberworks Robotics Inc and he started a new chapter of his career and life. All the best, Hamed.

MSc Graduation - Truong Nhu

Truong Nhu successfully defended his Master thesis. His result was very good as evaluated by the examination board. Congratulations, Truong.

Nhu has secured a job and he started a new chapter of his life. All the best, Nhu. 

A publication on IEEE Access

Truong Nhu published a paper on IEEE Access. This is a joint research work between the Morelab - UPEI and Soft Haptics Lab - JAIST

Fuzzy-based Distributed Behavioural Control with Wall-Following Strategy for Swarm Navigation in Arbitrary-Shared Environments

A publication on IEEE-RAL

Hamed published a paper on IEEE Robotics and Automation Letter - the well-known letter on robotics and automation.

Reliable, Robust, Accurate, and Real-time 2D LiDAR Human Tracking in Cluttered Environments: A Social Dynamic Filtering Approach

A publication at URAI2022

Graham Ching (summer undergraduate student) and Hamed published a paper at the 19th International Conference on Ubiquitous Robots (UR2022)

Touchless Shared-Control for Wheelchair Navigation

Morelab.org hosted Annual General Meeting of iMERIT (NSERC-CREATE program)

 The lab was very pleased to host the AMG of iMERIT this year. 

All the members worked hard to prepare for the two-day meetings at FSDE-UPEI. Special thanks to Morelab team members Carol and Liz who worked with the organizing team to make this event successful.

https://imerit.ocean.dal.ca/index.php/imerit-annual-meeting-conference-2022-university-of-prince-edward-island/

A publication on IEEE T-ASE

We recently published a paper in IEEE Transaction on Automation Science and Engineering - a highly scholarly journal in the Robotics field. 

Socially Aware Robot Navigation Framework: Where and How to Approach People in Dynamic Social Environments

A publication at ICMRE2022

Truong Nhu published a paper at the 8th International Conference on Mechatronics and Robotics Engineering (ICMRE2022)

Distributed Self-organized Collective Motion Control with Layered Structure for Robot Swarm

Publications at ROMAN2021 and SII2021

Mark Henderson published a paper at the 30th IEEE International Conference on Robot $ Human Interaction Communication (ROMAN2021). Hamed published a paper at the 2021 IEEE/SICE International Symposium on System Integration (SII2021). Two papers can be viewed and downloaded:

RRT-SMP: Socially Encoded Motion Primitives for Sampling-based Path Planning

2D Laser and 3D Camera Data Integration and Filtering for Human Trajectory Tracking

UPEIFA Merit Award for Scholarly Achievements

Dr. Ngo recently received the UPEIFA Merit Award for Scholarly Achievement. This prestigious award was nominated and selected by the university colleagues.

A journal paper published on Electronics

Tung Le (former PhD student of the MoreLab) and Dr. Trung Dung Ngo recently published a paper "Virtual pheromone based network flow control for modular robotic systems" on Electronics. This paper can be viewed and downloaded at: https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9292/9/3/481

The edited textbook on "Open-source Electronics Platform - Development and Applications" was published

An electronic version of this book can be downloaded at: https://www.mdpi.com/books/pdfview/book/1299

NSERC CREATE iMERIT - the large and longest NSERC fund.

Together with colleagues from Dalhousie University, University of New Brunswick, and Memorial University of Newfoundland, the Morelab is the unique representative of University of Prince Edward Island in the NSERC CREATE - iMerit training program, one of the largest NSERC funding in Canada. Please visit the website of our iMerit program for more info:

Two papers accepted at IEEE SII 2020

We do have two papers accepted at the IEEE International Symposium on System Integration, Hawaii, January 2020. Citations can be found below. 

• Gradient-based Routing Protocol for Modular Robotic Systems, Tung Van Le, Van Anh Ho, Trung Dung Ngo, IEEE International Symposium on System Integration, Hawaii, January 2020.
• Adaptive Hierarchical Distributed Control with Cooperative Task Allocation for Robot Swarms, Pham Duy Hung, Hung Manh La, and Trung Dung Ngo, EEE International Symposium on System Integration, Hawaii, January 2020.

Special issue on Robotic Co-workers: Psychological and Cognitive Safety in Human-robot Interactive Social Environments - IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Development Systems

*Important Dates*

31 December 2019 – Deadline for manuscript submission

15 Apr 2020 – Notification of authors

15 May 2020 – Deadline for revised manuscripts

15 July 2020 – Final version

Guest Editors*

Dr. Trung Dung Ngo

University of Prince Edward Island, Canada,

tngo@upei.ca

Dr. Rachid Alami

LAAS-CNRS, University of Toulouse, France 

Rachid.Alami@laas.fr

Dr. Takayuki Kanda
Kyoto University, Japan

kanda@i.kyoto-u.ac.jp

Dr. Goldie Nejat

University of Toronto, Canada

nejat@mie.utoronto.ca

Dr. Yongsheng Ou

SIAT, Chinese Academy of Science, China

ys.ou@siat.ac.cn

*Aim and Scope*

In the vision of a cyber-society, humans and robots will closely collaborate to perform given tasks. Robots will automate mundane tasks and let humans focus on higher-order jobs requiring more cognitive skills. In this trend, professional and personal service robots are enabling assistive technologies in human-robot shared workspaces. However, the first and the most challenging issue with respect to deploying developmental and cognitive robots in human populated environments is how to guarantee human physical and cognitive safety in human-robot shared workspaces. Physical safety is about how to maintain a minimum physical distance between robots and humans, which is obviously necessary to deploy autonomous robots in human populated environments, while cognitive safety 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 fearful and stressful towards collaborative robots as such robots don’t 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 for incorporating social signals, cues, and norms into developmental perception, cognitive reasoning and motion planning of the robot control architecture so that the robot is capable of securing human psychological and cognitive safety when interacting and collaborating with humans to perform tasks in human-robot shared workspaces.

*Themes*

The Special Issue aims to address challenges and methodologies of how to deal with psychological and cognitive safety in order to accelerate deployment and adoption of developmental and cognitive robots into human-robot shared workspaces. The ultimate goals of this special issue are to (1) to address the state-of-the-art research (2) and to generate an avenue for researchers to disseminate their recent research findings in the perspective of psychological and cognitive safety in human-robot shared workplaces.

This special issue targets on all aspects of guaranteeing psychological and cognitive safety in human-robot interactive social environments with, but not limited to, the following topics: 

Current state-of-the-art: future perspective of developmental and cognitive robots with concerns of ethics and rules for human psychological and cognitive safety in human-robot shared workspaces.

Perception for psychological and cognitive safety: capacity and roles of human face and body detection and tracking, human gestures and posture recognition, social cues and signal detection and identification, human-object interaction and human group interaction detection and tracking in satisfying psychological and cognitive safety. 

Cognitive reasoning, motion planning and control: methodological development of human aware robot navigation, collaborative task performances in dynamic social environments with concerns of psychological and cognitive safety.

Machine learning for developmental and cognitive robots: using learning by demonstration, reinforcement learning, deep learning, and hierarchical learning to enhance psychological and cognitive safety in human-robot shared workplaces.

Ergonomic studies of developmental and cognitive robots: developmental and cognitive factors and benchmarks, evaluation methods, objective and subjective measurement metrics, experiments and validation methods for psychological and cognitive safety.

Applications domains: concerns of psychological and cognitive safety when working with developmental and cognitive robots in public places, light industry, digital manufacturing, and transformed manufacturing.

*Submission Guideline*

Manuscripts should be prepared according to the “Information for Authors” of the journal found at https://cis.ieee.org/publications/t-cognitive-and-developmental-systems/tcds-information-for-authors and submissions should be done through the IEEE TCDS Manuscript center: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tcds-ieee and please select the category “SI: Psychological and Cognitive Safety”.

A paper to be appeared on IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics

We are happy that our latest research result has been accepted to appear on IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics.

"Hierarchical Distributed Control for Global Network Integrity Preservation in Multi-Robot Systems", Pham Duy Hung, Tran Quang Vinh, and Trung Dung Ngo, IEEE Transaction on Cybernetics (pre-print).