Abstract: Industrial robots started to penetrate factory automation, especially the automotive manufacturing segment, already in the 70’s. It is an industry that might in some respects be considered mature. A closer examination of the marketplace for industrial robots, however, will reveal that new robotic concepts, features and applications are introduced at an increasing rate. New entrants are finding their way to the market, and technological advances from a wide range of fields are quickly adopted by developers of industrial robotics. However there are still a wide variety of applications in many industrial segments where the advantages offered by robotics have yet to be applied. This presentation will review the state of the art of industrial robotics, and offer an overview of main trends and needs that drive the development of new robots and applications. While some areas will inevitably evolve through the incremental development and adoption of the latest advances in established technologies such as semiconductors, communications, sensors and signal processing, other advances will arise from the spill-over from the extensive ongoing research in the field of service robotics. This presentation will also offer a view into potential areas where significant break-throughs in underlying technologies could lead to a paradigm shift in the world of industrial robotics.

Biography:Christoffer Apneseth holds a B.Eng in Electronic Engineering from UMIST (University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology). He is currently Technology Manager for Robot Products in ABB. Christoffer started his career as a researcher in the Norwegian National Defence Research Establishment in 1994, and was later with Ericsson before joining ABB Corporate Research in 1997. In ABB Corporate Research, he was involved in different R&D projects within the industrial communication area. Christoffer is one of the original inventors and project leader for the development of the WISA wireless system for sensors and actuators, which won the Wall Street Journal Gold Award for Innovation in 2003. He later went on to manage the global R&D program for Industrial Communications and Sensors. In addition to his interest in wireless automation, he has had a strong emphasis on technology and strategies for Ethernet-based automation networks in ABB. Christoffer joined the robotic division of ABB in 2006 as product manager and R&D responsible for paint robots.

Abstract: As the number of data processing engines per embedded system grows significantly in the coming years, how to resolve the resource allocation problem has become a very challenging issue. In this talk, we shall present some critical design issues of multi-core operating systems and design tools of embedded systems. In particular, methodologies in the minimization of energy consumption and the optimization of real-time performance will be presented. Approaches on the library design for the minimization of communication overheads and co-simulation tool designs for multi-core embedded systems will also be presented.

Biography:Prof. Tei-Wei Kuo received the B.S.E. degree in Computer Science and Information Engineering from National Taiwan University in Taipei, Taiwan, in 1986. He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Sciences from the University of Texas at Austin in 1990 and 1994, respectively. He is currently a Professor of the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University. He served as the Chairman of his department from August 2005 to July 2008. Between Feb 2006 and July 2008, he also served as a Deputy Dean of the College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, National Taiwan University. Prof. Kuo has served in the editorial board of many journals, including the Journal of Real-Time Systems and IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics. He was the Program Chair and General Chair of the IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS) in 2007 and 2008, respectively, where RTSS is the flagship conference in real-time systems. Between 2005 and 2008, Prof. Kuo has also served as the Steering Committee Chair of the IEEE International Conference on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications (RTCSA). Prof. Kuo receives many research and teaching awards including the 2004 Ten Young Outstanding Persons Award of Taiwan, the Distinguished Research Award from the National Science Council, and the Distinguished Teaching Award from his university (Top 1%). His research interests include embedded systems, real-time task scheduling, real-time operating systems, flash-memory storage systems, and real-time database systems. He has over 170 technical papers published or been accepted in international journals and conferences and more than 6 patents in USA and Taiwan on the designs of flash-memory storage systems.

Abstract: Many systems built by humans can be “reasonably” modeled as discrete event (DES). This is particularly true in the manufacturing, logistic or communication domains. Diverse analysis and synthesis techniques for those kinds of formal constructions exist (based on rewriting or mathematical programming techniques, for example), nevertheless frequently the task is hampered by the so called state explosion problem. Thus the systematic exploration of relaxations of DES models combining accuracy and dramatic reduction on computational costs is of a major engineering interest.

We will concentrate on models based in Petri nets (PN), one of the broader and better known modeling paradigms for DES, and on relaxations by fluidification (or continuization). The idea is to relax the firing of transitions (thus the marking of their neighbors’ places) into the non negative reals, what may be quite reasonable when very populated or high traffic systems are considered (more precisely when the probability of enabling a certain transition is close to 1). Proceeding just in that way, discrete, hybrid and continuous (anyhow technically hybrid systems) PN models appear forming a single formal paradigm. Many properties of autonomous continuous net models become of polynomial complexity (among those lights are the synchronic properties), but others remain still even undecidable (shadows), essentially in timed models under the so called infinite servers semantics (even if fully continuous models are obtained; in fact: linear ordinary differential equations with constant coefficients, but provided with a minimum operator!). Among the lights of the approach many analytical techniques developed in Control Theory and Operations Research can be adapted or extended to the new classes of models. Some optimization problems (at design and at control) will be presented. Among the shadows, certain PN discrete models do not allow the mentioned relaxation (like many non-linear differential equations do not allow linear approximations!).

Biography:Manuel Silva is full professor of Systems Engineering and Automatic Control at the University of Zaragoza and the director of the GISED (“Grupo de Ingeniería de Sistemas de Eventos Discretos"). Dean (1987-89) of the Zaragoza University School of Industrial Engineering, he drove its transformation into the Polytechnic Centre (CPS) and was its first Director (1989-93). He has been President of the Advisory Council for Research (CONAI) of the Research Council of the Aragonese Government (1993-95). He also contributed to the Aragonese Institute for Advancement (IAF) in the creation of new enterprises and technological innovation. He is President of the European Program of Stays for Research (Government of Aragón and Caja Inmaculada).

Author or co-author of some three hundred publications, he has contributed to the organization of more than one hundred international conferences. Interested by history of science, technology and engineering, he is author or editor of several books in the domain.

He has received a medal from the city of Lille (France, 1996), was elected to the Spanish Royal Academy of Engineering (2000), and is Doctor Honoris Causa by the Université de Reims, Champagne-Ardennes (France, 2005).

Abstract: During the last decades, mobile robots have been a classic subject for robotics researchers, covering a large number of topics ranging from image processing, SLAM (Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping), all the way to control technologies and swarm techniques. However it was considered by many to be impossible to implement safety critical function in large production road vehicles.

However, some robotics techniques are now finally arriving in production vehicles with systems involving sensing, decision making and control of the vehicle. The first such systems concerned the "longitudinal control" of the vehicle with a radar (or lidar) sensing the distance (and sometimes their lateral position) to the vehicles ahead and controlling the acceleration and braking of the "ego vehicle" to maintain a safe distance. Now vision systems can assist the driver to keep his or her vehicle on the lane ("lateral control"). So, how far are we from a fully autonomous vehicle?

The DARPA challenges in 2004 and 2005 have shown us that automated vehicles are feasible in "simple" environments and in particular when we do not have to consider other moving vehicles. The next challenge from DARPA (Urban Challenge) has addressed this problem in 2008 with impressive demonstrations. However, we are still far from operating a fully autonomous vehicle in daily traffic, especially in urban environments where the scene complexity is very large. In order to operate fully autonomous vehicles in a realistic way, we therefore have to take the same approach as in the manufacturing industry when the first robots were introduced: simplify the environment.

This is the approach which is being taken now with the cybercars. These vehicles are designed for a fully automated urban transport of passengers or goods and they operate on a road network for on-demand, door to door transport. At the moment, these roads are more or less protected from intrusions by people or other types of vehicles. The cybercars which have been designed and tested in the early 2000's are now being put in operation in various cities throughout Europe (www.citymobil-project.org). Although their environment has been somewhat simplified, they must use advanced robotics technologies to avoid obstacles and plan their trajectories even when they have to cross the path of other similar vehicles (with which they communicate).

Biography:Michel Parent is currently the program manager at INRIA of the R&D team on advanced road transport (IMARA research group). This group focuses on research and development of information and communication technologies for road transport and in particular on fully automated vehicles (the cybercars).

Before his current position which he holds since 1991, Michel Parent has spent half of his time in research and academia at such places as Stanford University and MIT in the USA and INRIA in France, and the other half in the robotics industry. He is the author of several books on robotics, vision and intelligent vehicles, and numerous publications and patents. He was the coordinator of the European Project CyberCars between 2001 and 2004 and the follow-up project CyberCars2 (2006-2009). He was involved in many other French European projects on ITS.

Michel Parent has an engineering degree from the French Aeronautics School (ENSAE), a Masters degree in Operation Research and a Ph.D. in Computer Science, both from Case Western Reserve University, USA.