Lorenzo Natale will give 2 lectures; on November 29 and on November 30.

L ecture November 29: Interactive object learning and perception with vision and touch

L ecture November 30: Building reactive behaviors for robotics with behavior trees

TU/e researchers can book an hour to talk to Lorenzo by sending a mail to G.Janssen-Dols@tue.nl.

The possible time slots on both November 29 and 30 are: 11.30-12.30, 14.00-15.00, 15.00-16.00, 16.00-17.00, 17.00-18.00h.

L ecture November 29

Interactive object learning and perception with vision and touch

Modern AI algorithms provide exceptional performance, but require long training time and large, annotated, datasets. This hampers their application in those settings, such as robotics, in which data is scarce. On the other hand, robots can actively interact with the environment to acquire new knowledge.

To extract structured information, however, they need to be endowed with appropriate sensors, and exploratory behavior that guide the interaction with the world. In this talk I will present various studies in which we have investigated the use of visual and tactile information to explore, perceive and grab objects.

I will also present recent work in which we have developed fast learning algorithms that allow robots to learn about objects from interaction.

L ecture November 30

Building reactive behaviors for robotics with behavior trees

Programming robots to perform complex tasks requires proper integration of several component and real-time orchestration. Behavior trees (BTs) have been proposed as a formalism to design and implement robot behaviors that are intrinsic reactive, modular and easier to read.

In this talk I will revise our work with BTs and how they have been used in our laboratory to implement complex behaviors with humanoid robots. I will also illustrate some extensions to BTs that address specific problems in robotics and how BTs have been integrated in the robot software architecture, using the example of a robotic museum guide developed in the EU project 5GTOURS.

Finally I will present how BTs are being used in the context of the EU project CONVINCE at the top layer of the robot deliberation system, and preliminary work towards formalization of BT to support verification of robot behaviors.

Lecture visiting professor Lorenzo Natale