“From Ground Robots to Transformable UAVs: Applications to Precision Agriculture”
Wednesday, April 17 @ 10:00 am
221 MAE-A
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Abstract

Teams of cooperating robots equipped with advanced sensors, state-of-the-art software for reasoning and decision making, robust communication, and mission execution capability have the potential to introduce game-changing automation in many real-life applications such as data science, search/rescue, social robotics, surveillance, infrastructure protection, scientific exploration, and smart environments. In this talk, the design of a modular hardware and software infrastructure is discussed in order to investigate the placement and successful operation of these devices in the real world. Furthermore, we discuss the art and science designing these robotic systems. The major innovation of our work lies in the creation of a flexible design spectrum that covers systems that move on the ground, fly, swim, and dive. These systems can also transform from one state to the next creating a new generation of transformer robots. All these devices are revolving around an evolutionary design approach which is based on our experience with the UMN Scout platform, one of the first miniature, fully functional robotic systems of which thousands of units have been deployed around the world.

The talk will conclude with examples of using these systems in Precision Agriculture applications.

Biography

Nikolaos P. Papanikolopoulos (IEEE Fellow) received the Diploma degree in electrical and computer engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece, in 1987, the M.S.E.E. in electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Pittsburgh, PA, in 1988, and the Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, in 1992. Currently, he is a McKnight Presidential Endowed Professor and a Distinguished McKnight University Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Minnesota and Director of the Center for Distributed Robotics and SECTTRA. His research interests include robotics, computer vision, and sensors/algorithms for transportation, precision agriculture, and medical applications.