Research Leader - Vladimir Estivill-Castro
Overview
Autonomous systems are embodied as smart electronic/software devices. They are capable of operating on their own (without assistance from human beings) in either known or unknown environments. This ability requires autonomous systems to:
- sense all the objects from their surroundings;
- detect objects motions;
- process the obtained information;
- predict likely changes;
- decide on the best course of action;
- execute their decision; and
- continue to observe the immediate surrounding environment to learn what else, if any, would be required in order for the autonomous system to fulfill its mission with the best possible performance.
The fulfillment of the assigned mission objectives appears to be the main driving force behind a successful operation of autonomous systems.
Research challenges
Intelligent autonomous systems (alias artificial beings) will become our partners in the workplace and home, able to respond to our requests and, not just recognize our routine, but tune themselves to our specific needs.
Thus, the future is in human adaptive artifacts and their collaborative relationships with human beings. Since humans use voice, gestures, verbal and facial expressions to convey their opinion, intention and emotions, the autonomous systems need to be empowered to recognize and understand these expressions by human beings, adapt themselves to the ever changing needs of human beings. and perhaps express themselves too. Our research will help us understand how cognitive interactions between human and artificial beings may work and be achieved within a particular living environment.
Applications
Normally, cooperative systems consist of multiple actors (decision makers) each representing either biological or an artificial creature (human being or an artificial being), acting together towards accomplishing mutually agreed objective.
Examples of cooperative systems are numerous. They can be: students and teachers in the classroom, employees at their workplace, drivers and pedestrian on the roads, robots in the factory, people at a party, aircrafts in the sky, robots in search-and-rescue operations. However, they can also be: unmanned aircrafts in military surveillance and attack missions, or robots on the battlefield.
Thus, cooperative systems attract an interest not just from control engineers and scientists but also from biologists, economists, applied mathematicians, computer scientists, many decision theorists, and of course, social and political scientists.
Our research effort is currently focused on to the following research projects and laboratories:
Intelligent Control Systems Laboratory
- Design and development of cooperative driverless vehicles and their embodiment towards a new generation of city transport systems - cybernetic transport systems.
- Collaborative computer games
- Robocup
- Non-monotonic reasoning for managing consistency in localization of mobile robots
- Robots for people who are blind
- Face recognition
- Robot-Human Interaction in Strategy Games
- Teaching Robots - soccer teaches social skills to robots
Robotics and Gaming
- Simulated robot soccer games
- Intelligent game characters
- Multiplayer computer games
- Biped robots
- Ubiquitous technology in education