Designing the Next Generation of Robots

(that may eventually take over the world!)

When robots first started to appear in the industry during the 1980s, they were clumsy machines that had to operate in highly structured environments. In contrast, today, we see robots penetrating ever more deeply into our daily lives. Many rehabilitative and prosthetic robots have already become an integral part of the treatment of several illnesses and injuries.

Due to the vast distances and adverse conditions in the cosmos, space exploration with human subjects is nearly impossible. However, the sturdiness of robots means that they can withstand prolonged radiation bombardment, lack of gravitational forces, and many more adverse conditions and can still provide us with invaluable information about cosmos. They could even be used to colonize planets around us for the welfare of humans and other species. Autonomous cars are right around the corner and if the legal issues around it can be overcome, we could easily be looking at a future where traffic accidents are reduced by huge proportions.

In this talk, we are going to discuss this booming area of contemporary research and technology. In particular, we’ll go over what students can expect to learn in the upcoming course ME 597/ ECE 564 Robotics and Automated Systems.

About the Presenter

Aykut C. Satici is an assistant professor in the Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering department at the Boise State Unviersity, directing the Robot Control Laboratory (RCL). He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and M.Sc. in Mathematics from the University of Texas at Dallas in 2014 and 2013, respectively. Previously, he had received his MSc. and B.Sc. in Mechatronics Engineering from Sabanci University in 2010 and 2008, respectively. He has held postdoctral scholar positions at the PRISMA Lab of University of Naples Federico II, Naples, Italy and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA. His research aims to enable robots to efficiently and robustly perform desired manipulation and locomotion tasks by designing low-level feedback control and estimation algorithms. This avenue of research lies in the intersection of dynamical systems, robotics, control, and applied mathematics. Tools from analysis, optimization, and differential geometry are integral to the tehoretical development of my research, which I like to complement with experimental evaluation to assess its practical utility. He has an Erdős number of 4.

Report abuse