Robotic Manipulation for Nuclear Sort and Segregation
Researchers
Dr. Rustam Stolkin will serve as Senior Birmingham Fellow in Robotics at University of Birmingham. He achieved undergraduate and master’s degrees in Engineering Science from Oxford University, and a PhD in Robot Vision undertaken between University College London and UK imaging industry. He also spent time at Stevens Institute of Technology in USA. He has more than 80 publications, spanning robotic vision, manipulation and grasping as well as several other areas of science and engineering. He also holds two patents awarded and one patent pending, spanning both robotic vision algorithms and robotic mechanisms. He was previously a co-lead on >$5million US National Science Foundation projects, a co-lead on the EU FP7 GeRT project (~€900,000 UoB contribution), and has led a number of grants funded by other agencies.
Dr. Stolkin is particularly active in coordinating collaborations between academia and industry, currently supervising 9 different projects with industry, including: defence industry (bomb disposal and rescue robots), nuclear industry (robotics and computer vision for decommissioning and cleanup), and manufacturing industry (advanced robotics for factory automation). Dr. Stolkin will act serve as Project Coordinator and chair of the Project Board for the RoMaNS project. He will also provide academic co-supervision of the UoB vision and manipulation research work.
Prof. Aleš Leonardis is a Professor of Robotics at Birmingham University. He holds undergraduate and master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering, and a PhD in Computer Vision, from University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, having also spent time at the GRASP lab University of Pensylvania. He is internationally recognised for his pioneering Computer Vision research on segmenting and modelling objects from 3D point-cloud data, novel machine learning methods for object category recognition, and world-leading algorithms for robust visual tracking. He has published more than 220 peer reviewed papers and had career funding of £4million. He has participated in one EU FP5 project (CogVis), three FP6 projects (IP CoSy, FET Mobvis4, Marie Curie VisionTrain), and three FP7 projects (IP CogX, STREP Poeticon, STREP PaCMan). He has also received funding from the Slovenian Research Agency and DARPA, USA. As a Principal Investigator he has managed more than 750 person-months efforts demonstrating leadership and sustained success in supervising staff, postdoctoral researchers and research students.
Prof. Leonardis will lead all UoB autonomous vision research, serving as lead supervisor of all UoB postdocs and PhD students working on these tasks. He will also use his very large experience of EU projects to assist Dr. Stolkin with project coordination.
Dr. Marek Kopicki is the most senior Research Fellow in the Birmingham Intelligent Robotics Lab. Following undergraduate and master’s degrees in Theoretical Physics from Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland, he became a professional software developer in Germany and has many years industry programming experience. He later returned to academia, completing masters and PhD degrees in robotics. He has more than ten years experience of developing state-of-the-art algorithms and software for advanced control of robotic arms and hands. He personally developed the Birmingham University arm/hand control software, currently comprising 150,000 lines of C++ code.
Dr. Kopicki produced the manipulation software and research ideas which previously underpinned much of FP6 CoSy, FP7 CogX, FP7 GeRT, and now is central to FP7 PaCMan. He is the inventor of a state-of-the-art adaptable/generalisable grasping algorithm, for which he holds a patent pending. He has also published more than ten papers in robotics.
Dr. Kopicki will lead WP4 Integration, and supervise the overall software structure and software integration of contributions from all RoMaNS partners. He will also lead the grasping and manipulation parts of the UoB research tasks, and provide lead academic supervision to the UoB post-docs and PhD students working on those tasks, with co-supervision from Dr. Stolkin.
Dr. Paolo Robuffo Giordano is a CNRS research scientist (CR1) in the Lagadic group at Irisa in Rennes, France, since 2012. He holds a PhD degree in Systems Engineering obtained in 2008 at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. From January 2007 to July 2007 and from November 2007 to October 2008 he was a research scientist at the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, German Aerospace Center (DLR), Germany, and from October 2008 to November 2012 he was a senior research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics and scientific leader of the group “Human-Robot Interaction” (HRI). His scientific interests include motion control for mobile robots and mobile manipulators, visual control of robots, 3D structure estimation from motion, locomotion interfaces for VR applications, robotic-based motion simulators, bilateral teleoperation, multi-robot estimation and control, aerial robotics. He has published more than 80 papers in international journals and conferences, and in 2008 he was awarded with the “Best 2008 PhD Thesis in Robotics and Automatic Control” in Italy. He co-organized scientific workshops at ICRA 2011, ICRA 2012, ICRA 2013, and ICRA 2014 on the topics of human-robot interaction, teleoperation, shared control and multi-robots. He was Guest Editor of the Special Issue “Autonomous Physical Human-Robot Interaction” of the International Journal of Robotics Research, and is currently Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics. He has been in the Program Committee of the
Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) conference in 2010, 2011 and 2013, and has served as Area Chair of RSS 2014 and 2015. He was Associate Editor of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2011) and of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2012, ICRA 2013, ICRA 2014, ICRA 2015).
In the RoMaNS project, Dr. Robuffo Giordano will lead the CNRS team. He will serve as overall Work Package Leader for WP2 Perception and visualisation. He will also provide academic supervision and coordination for the CNRS researchers working on WP1, WP2 and WP3.
Dr. François Chaumette, IEEE fellow, is an Inria senior research scientist (DR1) and Head of the Lagadic group at Irisa in Rennes. He received the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Rennes in 1990. His research interests include visual servoing, active perception, robotics, and computer vision. He published more than 200 international journal and conference papers. He received the AFCET/CNRS Prize for the best French thesis in automatic control in 1991. He also received the 2002 King-Sun Fu Memorial Best IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation Paper Award. He is or has been involved in the Program Committee of the main conferences in robotics and computer vision (ICRA, IROS, RSS, ICCV, CVPR, ECCV). He has been Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics from 2001 to 2005 and is now in the Editorial Board of the Int. Journal of Robotics Research. He has been a key scientist for the EU Aerospace Pegase project, and is currently involved in the EU FP7 Removedebris project. He has been evaluator for the EU Echord projects and is a Panel Member for the ERC Consolidator Grants.
In the RoMaNS project, Dr. Chaumette will help supervising the activities of WP2 (visual tracking and visual servoing), and partially the activities of WP3 (autonomous trajectory planning). Furthermore, Dr. Chaumette will provide academic co-supervision of all researchers and PhD students involved in the project together with Dr. Robuffo Giordano.
Fabien Spindler is an Inria senior research engineer (IR1) in the Lagadic group at Irisa in Rennes, France. He graduated in 1992 from the Engineer National School (ENI) in Brest, France, and achieved a Master in Electronics and Aerospace Telecom from Sup’Aéro in Toulouse, France in 1993. He is in charge of the robotics equipment and software development in the Lagadic group. He is the main author of the open-source ViSP library devoted to visual tracking and visual servoing. He has been involved in several software transfers to academic and industrial partners.
For the RoMaNS project, Mr. Spindler will lead any hardware and software integration tasks within the Irisa lab, assist the Irisa researchers with the ViSP library and writing vision code, and help with integrating the CNRS research outputs with the rest of the RoMaNS consortium.
Prof. Dr. Jan Peters is a full professor of Computer Science at the TUDa and head of Intelligent Autonomous Systems. Before becoming a professor, he was a senior research scientist and group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, heading the Robot Learning Lab (RoLL). He received a PhD from the University of Southern California, working with Stefan Schaal, Sethu Vijyakumar and Firdaus Udwadia. His PhD received the 2007 Dick Volz Best US PhD Thesis in Robotics & Automation Runner-Up Award based on thesis impact in the years after its publication. He holds MSc’s in Computer Science and in Mechanical Engineering from University of Southern California, a German MSc in Informatics from Hagen University and a German MSc in Electrical Engineering from TU München. He has received numerous awards, most recently the 2013 Early Career Award of the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society and the 2013 INNS Young Investigator Award.
Prof. Peters will provide overall coordination and leadership for the TUDa team, and provide academic co-supervision of all researchers with Dr. Neumann, and co-leadership of WP 3 on autonomous manipulation with Dr. Neumann.
Dr. tech. Gerhard Neumann joined the IAS group as Post-Doc in November 2011 and has become a Group Leader for Machine Learning for Control in October 2013 with focus on information theoretic policy search, hierarchical and structured learning for robotics, movement primitives and reinforcement learning for robotics. He is directly responsible for two PhD. Students and several master students. Before coming to Darmstadt, Gerhard did his Ph.D. at the Graz University of Technology (TUG) under the supervision of Wolfgang Maass. He has published at several top-ranked conferences including ICML, NIPS, AISTATS and ICRA. He won two best paper awards (HUMANOIDS, IROS) and already organized several workshops on the topic robot learning and hierarchical learning methods. He already organized and co-organized workshops at ICRA 2013 and RSS 2013.
Dr. Neumann will lead WP3 with assistance from Prof. Peters. He will provide hands-on coding and research work as well as academic co-supervision for the post-doc and PhD researchers working on active segmentation vision task T2.3 as well as the reinforcement learning for robotic manipulation tasks in WP3.
Dr. Mathieu Grossard
Mathieu Grossard received the Master of Science degree in robotics and automation from the Ecole Centrale de Nantes in 2005 and a Ph.D. in automation from the University of Franche-Comté in 2008. Since then, he has been a Researcher at CEA-LIST. His research interests are mechatronics and automation, including design and control of smart actuators, modelling and control of compliant structures and advanced methodologies of robust control for robot manipulators, and control of nonlinear systems.
Dr. Grossard’s role in the RoMaNS project will be focused on the design of the teleoperated hand system (15% of his time).
Dr. Florian Gosselin
Florian Gosselin received the Engineering Degree in Robotics from the Ecole Centrale de Nantes in 1995 and a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Poitiers in 2000. He joined CEA-LIST in 2000 as Project Manager and Research Engineer. He acted as chief designer in more than 10 haptic interface design studies (serial and parallel architectures, poly-articulated and tensed cable structures, rigid and compliant joints, non-redundant and redundant actuation). He also supervised or participated to the development of state of the art multimodal VR platforms with applications in CAD, telesurgery, cultural heritage, digital arts and entertainment. He is inventor or co-inventor of more than 15 patents and the co-author of more than 45 scientific publications in the field. He managed several industrial, National and EU funded projects for CEA-LIST.
Dr. Gosselin’s role in the RoMaNS project will be focused on exoskeletons design for the master side (20% of his time).
Dr. Franck Geffard
Franck Geffard received the Engineering degree in Automatic and Robotics from the Ecole Centrale de Nantes in 1997 and a Ph.D. from the University of Nantes in 2000. He has worked at CEA LIST since 2001 as Research Engineer and Project Manager. He was responsible for the development of the TAO2000 V2 Controller (generic robotics and telerobotics controller, multi-robot and multi-client).
Dr. Geffard’s role in the RoMaNS project will be focused on control framework for teleoperating master and slave systems (15% of his time).
Mr. Yvan Measson
Yvan Measson achieved masters degrees in engineering and robotics, graduating 1998 (Nantes). At CEA, he developed the maestro system for nuclear dismantling 2000-2006, and became head of the teleoperation and cobotics laboratory 2006-2010. He has served as Business Development manager for robotics and virtual reality since 2010. He is now involved in several industrial committees in France, directly linked with robotics, including ISO working group ISO/TC 184/SC 2/WG 8.
Mr. Measson was project manager of maestro action in CEA for 6 years. The goal of this project was to develop a complete dismantling system based on hydraulic arm maestro. The control algorithms, electronic and supervision system has been transferred to the industrial company Cybernetix and the system is now a product which will enter its first nuclear cell in 2012. He has been Head of laboratory for 4 years before he started to work on business development and has contributed to several licenses definition and negotiations, both for teleoperation, cobotique and software.
Mr. Measson’s role in the RoMaNS project will be to bring his strong expertise in the design of teleoperation systems and their dedicated real-time controller (5% of his time).
Mr. Philippe Garrec
Philippe Garrec is a senior research engineer and a consultant at CEA LIST. During over 25 years of career at CEA, he has been working on manipulators, electric actuators and energy recovery, telescopic structures and transmissions. He has demonstrated with his team the first transport of a payload in a real nuclear plant with a hexapod walking robot, and designed an innovative telescopic leg for a compact hexapod intended for the French electricity utility (EDF). He also designed various manipulators and teleoperators for CEA and AREVA. He is credited with the invention of the screw-cable actuator implemented in various force feedback manipulators such as Virtuose 6D/MAT6D (commercialized), the slave arm STeP, the upper limb exoskeleton ABLE (commercialized) and the lower limb exoskeleton HERCULE. The arm exoskeleton ABLE has been implemented in the French project BRAHMA for rehabilitation purpose and distinguished among European mobility research projects by a National Science Foundation panel (Reinkensmeyer and Boninger Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation 2012). He is the principal designer of a long reach telescopic manipulator for the French defense project Laser Mega-Joule. His research work addresses modeling and identification of friction and transparency in mechanisms. As leader of the ISO-TC85/SC2/WG24, he is also involved in the standardization of remote handling devices for nuclear applications and the promoter of a standard for telerobotics. He was invited by the METI as expert in the International Symposium on Decommissioning of TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Unit 1-4 held in Tokyo in 2012. He was also invited to present French nuclear robotics at the Workshop on Robotics and Automation for Nuclear Facilities of the IROS 2013 conference held in Tokyo. He has written 24 articles of conference and journal (15 as first author and 8 as co-author), 3 book contributions and is the author of 25 delivered/filed patents.
Mr. Garrec’s role in the RoMaNS project will be to bring his expertise in mechanical design for teleoperation master-slave system (5% of his time).
Dr Jeffrey Kuo
Dr J. A. Kuo, CEng, MIMechE, PhD, B.Eng. Hons., is a Chartered Engineer and Member of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers. With a PhD in robot inverse kinematics, Dr. Kuo has 18 years of experience of remote handling equipment and robotics applied to nuclear operations and decommissioning. He is a National Nuclear Laboratory Research Fellow in robotics and has developed a teleoperable visualization and simulation system for training, engineering design and research. Dr. Kuo is also involved with the development of autonomous systems for specific nuclear requirements. Dr. Kuo will lead WP5 and WP6.
Mr Robert Bowen
Mr R.A. Bowen, CEng. FIMechE, B.Sc. Hons., is a Chartered Engineer and Fellow of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers with 27 years of experience in design, development, installation and commissioning of teleoperable systems for nuclear process plants and decommissioning. Mr Bowen has been responsible for developing the NNL’s Telerobotics and Autonomy program and includes a range of research projects aimed at developing the UK nuclear industry’s telerobotic and autonomous capability. Mr Bowen will be involved in WP5 and WP6.