Plenary Sessions

Plenary I: Design

Tuesday, September 27, 2011, 12:30-13:45, Continental Ballroom

Moderator: Professor Bernard Roth, Stanford University

The Design Plenary features three design pioneers (Hirose, Hirzinger, and Raibert) discussing their perspectives on various aspects of mechanism design. After initial presentations by the panelists, the chair (Roth) will moderate a panel discussion with the experts and the audience.

Professor Shigeo Hirose was born in Tokyo in 1947. He received his B.Eng. Degree with First Class Honors in Mechanical Engineering from Yokohama National University in 1971, and his M. Eng. and Ph.D. Eng. Degrees in Control Engineering from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1973 and 1976, respectively. From 1976 to 1979 he was a Research Associate, and from 1979 to 1992 an Associate Professor. Since 1992 he has been a Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. He is a fellow of JSME and IEEE. He is engaged in creative design of robotic systems. Prof. Hirose has been awarded more than twenty prizes.

Professor Gerd Hirzinger is director at DLR’s institute for „Robotics and Mechatronics“, which is one of the biggest and most acknowledged Institutes in the field worldwide. He was prime investigator of the space robot technology experiment ROTEX, the first remote controlled robot in space, which flew onboard shuttle COLUMBIA in April 1993. He has published more than 600 papers in robotics. He received numerous national and international awards, e.g., in 1994 the Joseph-Engelberger-Award for achievements in robotic science and in 1995 the Leibniz-Award, the highest scientific award in Germany and the JARA (Japan robotics association) Award. In 2005 he received the IEEE Pioneer Award of the Robotics and Automation Society, and in 2007 the IEEE Field Award “Robotics and Automation”.

Dr. Marc Raibert was Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and a member of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1986 through 1995. He is co-founder and President of Boston Dynamics Inc, (BDI), which is located near MIT in Cambridge. Raibert's research is devoted to the study of systems that move dynamically, including physical robots and animated creatures. Raibert received a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Northeastern University in 1973, and a Ph.D from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977. He is author of Legged Robots That Balance published by MIT Press, and is on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Robotics Research. He is a fellow of the AAAI.

Plenary II: BioRobotics

Wednesday, September 28, 2011, 12:30-13:45, Continental Ballroom

Moderator: Professor Ruzena Bajcsy, University of California, Berkeley

The BioRobotics Plenary features three biorobotics pioneers (Berthoz, Buelthoff, and Srinivasan) discussing their perspectives on various aspects of biorobotics and biomimetic robotics. After initial presentations by the panelists, the chair (Bajcsy) will moderate a panel discussion with the experts and the audience.

Professor Alain Berthoz was born in 1939. He became Civil Engineer at École des Mines in 1963, Ph.D. in 1973. As researcher at (CNRS) (1966-1981), he established and coordinated the Neurosensory Physiology Laboratory (1981-1993). Since 1993, he is professor at Collège de France and director of UMR CNRS/Collège de France "Physiology of perception and action". He has over 200 scientific publications in international journals on physiology of sensori-motor functions and more specifically on the oculomotor system, the vestibular system, balance control, and movement perception. He had given about 90 invited talks across the world.

Professor Heinrich Bülthoff is scientific member of the Max Planck Society and director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen. He is head of the Department Human Perception, Cognition and Action in which a group of about 70 researchers investigate psychophysical and computational aspects of higher level visual processes in object and face recognition, sensory-motor integration, spatial cognition, and perception and action in virtual environments. He holds a Ph.D. degree in the natural sciences from the Eberhard-Karls-Universität in Tübingen. He was Assistant, Associate and Full Professor of Cognitive Science at Brown University in Providence from 1988-1993 before becoming director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics.

Professor Mandyam Srinivasan is at the Queensland Brain Institute and the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering of the University of Queensland. He holds an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from Bangalore University, a Master's degree in Electronics from the Indian Institute of Science, a Ph.D. in Engineering and Applied Science from Yale University, a D.Sc. in Neuroethology from the Australian National University, and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Zurich. Among his awards and honors are Fellowships of the Australian Academy of Science, of the Royal Society of London, and of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World, an Inaugural Federation Fellowship, the 2006 Australia Prime Minister’s Science Prize, and the 2008 U.K. Rank Prize for Optoelectronics.

Plenary III:Self-Driving Cars

Thursday, September 29, 2011, 13:30-14:30, Continental Ballroom

Moderator: Professor Henrik Christensen, Georgia Tech

Most of us use a car every day. But unlike airplanes, which have been flying on autopilots for decades, cars are still driven manually - just the way they were driven 100 years ago. This talk will introduce the transformative concept of a self-driving car. Following early research in the 1990 in Germany and the US, and more recently the DARPA Challenges, this technology has now been advanced to a point where it is within reach of commercial realizations that may provide benefits to pretty much anyone who drives a car. At the core of this progress is a new generation of cutting-edge artificial intelligence, which enables a self-driving car to understand its environment and to interact with other traffic. The speaker will discuss the Google Self-Driving Car project, in which a fleet of self-driving cars navigated more than 160,000 miles on public roads in California and Nevada, including the downtowns of San Francisco and Los Angeles. The speaker will also discuss some of the societal implications of this new technology.

Sebastian Thrun is a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). He led the development of the robotic vehicle Stanley that won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. His team also developed Junior, which placed second at the DARPA Urban Challenge in 2007. Thrun led the development of the Google self-driving car and is well known for his work on probabilistic programming techniques in robotics, with applications including robotic mapping. He was elected into the National Academy of Engineering and also into the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in 2007. In 2011, he received the Max-Planck-Research Award and the inaugural AAAI Ed Feigenbaum Prize. Thrun received his Diplom (master's degree) in 1993 and a PhD (summa cum laude) in 1995 in computer science and statistics from the University of Bonn. He was on the CMU faculty from 1995 till 2003. Since 2003 he has been on the faculty of the Stanford Computer Science department. He is also a Google Fellow.

Chris Urmson is the head of engineering for Google’s self-driving car program. He was the Director of Technology responsible for Boss, the vehicle that won the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. His team had vehicles finish 2nd and 3rd in the 2005 DARPA Grand challenge. Chris received his B.Eng. from the University of Manitoba in 1998 and his Ph.D in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2005. From 2006 - 2011 Chris was on the faculty of the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute.