[Announcement] Dr. Corina Barbalata from the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, at Louisiana State University will give a virtual talk titled “The challenges and capabilities of free-floating autonomous robots for exploration of extreme environments” on Thursday, November 12, 15:00-16:00 HST.
Zoom: https://hawaii.zoom.us/j/99861316992
Abstract – The Deep Space and the Deep Ocean are very similar in the sense that they are positioned at the end of continuum of extreme environments and pressures, that without the advancement of technology humans cannot access it. The advancements of robotics allowed us to access areas that have never been reached before and see details of wonders that were previously hidden to the human eye, all while reducing costs and increasing safety for space and ocean exploration. Nevertheless, robots used for space and ocean exploration still struggle with the environmental hazards. Moreover, if we are aiming to have autonomous robots in these environments we have to ensure that they are robust to achieve their missions and they can safely return on land. This talk will focus on autonomous robots for exploration of Deep Space and Oceans. We will give an overview of the challenges faced by a specific type of robotic systems used in air, in space and in underwater environments: the free-floating vehicle manipulator system. These types of robots not only allow for surveying the environment but also interacting with it. We will discuss different approaches to model and evaluate the behaviour of free-floating vehicle manipulator systems that can be used first as a simulation tool but also to control the performance of such systems. Furthermore, we will show how to enable autonomous robust and precise behaviors and how to extend the autonomy of free-floating vehicle manipulator systems using intelligent control structures.
About the Speaker – Dr. Corina Barbalata is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, at Louisiana State University. She is the co-director of the iCORE Laboratory and is leading the Robotics Kinematics and Dynamics (RKinD) group at LSU. She received a B.S degree in Electrical Engineering from Transilvania University, Romania, in 2011. In 2013 through the VIsion and RoBOTics (VIBOT) program, she got her double M.S degree in Computer Vision and Robotics from Heriot-Watt University (Scotland, UK) and University of Burgundy (France). She received her PhD in Electrical Engineering from Heriot-Watt University (Scotland, UK) in 2017, and between 2017 and 2019 she was a postdoctoral researcher in the Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering department at University of Michigan. Dr. Barbalata and her group are working on designing novel dynamic models and control algorithms for multi-body robotic systems, with a focus on adaptive algo- rithms for robust, precise, and energy-efficient motion and interaction applications of rigid robotics. Her research interests are in dynamic and hydrodynamic mod- elling, control theory, motion planning, with applications to mobile manipulation and marine robotics.