Robotics and Autonomous Systems – Vision Challenges and Actions

Peter Bruce is Wolfson Professor of Materials at the University of Oxford. His research interests embrace materials chemistry and electrochemistry, with a particular emphasis on energy storage. Recent efforts have focused on the synthesis and understanding of new cathode materials for lithium and sodium ion batteries, understanding processes in all solid-state batteries and the challenges of the lithium-air battery. His pioneering work has provided many advances.

Peter has received numerous awards, including the Tilden Prize of the RSC, the Carl Wagner Award of the ECS, the Liversidge Award of the RSC and the Hughes Medal of the RS. He has also been recognised as a Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate Analytics each year since 2015.

Peter is a founder and Chief Scientist of the Faraday Institution, the UK centre for research on electrochemical energy storage. Peter took up the position of Physical Secretary and Vice President of the Royal Society in 2018.

Bernard Charlès has been working as the CEO of Dassault Systèmes since 1995. He started his career in the company in 1983 to develop new design technologies. In 1986, he founded a dedicated New Technologies, Research and Strategy department, and in 1988 was appointed President of Strategy, Research and Development.

Charlès has helped instill a culture of ongoing innovation to further consolidate Dassault Systèmes’ scientific capabilities and make science part of the company’s DNA. The inspiration behind digital mock-up, product lifecycle management and 3DEXPERIENCE®, he firmly believes that 3D technology is about making possible the impossible: 3D universes are the most powerful vehicle for testing concepts and creating the future, bringing dream and reality together, and stretching the limits of science and imagination to drive progress in society.

Charlès has positioned Dassault Systèmes as the preferred partner for innovation, empowering businesses with sustainable step-changes in competitive performance. The company, established in 1981 and world leader in 3D software, has been recognized as one of Forbes’ "The World’s Most Innovative Companies".

Bernard Charlès holds the rank of Knight (2005) and Officer (2012) in the “Légion d’Honneur” (French Legion of Honor) and is a member of the French Academy of Technology. He is a graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure engineering school in Cachan and has a PhD in mechanical engineering majoring in automation engineering and information science. He also holds an agrégation — the most senior teaching qualification achievable in France (specializing in mechanical engineering).

David Lane is Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics, a £35M joint venture between Heriot-Watt and Edinburgh Universities, involving some 30 world leading investigators in 12 cross disciplinary research groups across Engineering and Informatics. It includes the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS), and the ROBOTARIUM National Equipment Facility for Research into Robot Interaction. He also directs the Oceans Systems Laboratory at HWU.

In 2001 he founded SeeByte Ltd and Inc, and as CEO until 2010 lead the company’s organic evolution from startup to a multi-million dollar organization commercialising a 20 year portfolio of research in autonomous subsea robotics into the international offshore energy and defence markets. Growing at an average 45% pa during the recession, continually cash positive, with 75% of its business in exports to three continents and offices in Edinburgh, San Diego and Seattle, SeeByte won the 2010 Praxis Unico Business Impact Achieved Award and 2013 Scottish Digital Technology Award for International Growth.

In public leadership roles, he chaired the BIS/InnovateUK Robotics and Autonomous Systems Special Interest Group (RAS-SIG) from 2013-14, formulating and launching the UK’s national RAS innovation strategy for the Minister for Universities and Science. From 2013-15 he was a Director of the euRobotics AISBL not-for-profit shaping the EU Horizon2020 Robotics public-private partnership between research and industry.

Andrew Blake is an engineer whose innovative work on image analysis has made it possible for computers to react to the world around them based on the visual data they receive. His research has focused particularly on the accurate tracking of motion and the reconstruction of surfaces from reflected light.

Amongst his many contributions to the field, he is perhaps best known for the development of the condensation algorithm — the first tool that allowed computers to correctly interpret complex motion. As the Managing Director of Microsoft Research Cambridge, Andrew was also part of the team behind the company’s Kinect controller — a revolutionary gaming system capable of following instructions dictated by the body movements of its users.

The recipient of the Silver Medal and MacRobert Award of the Royal Academy of Engineering, Andrew has also won the prestigious Mountbatten Medal from the Institution of Engineering and Technology. In 2010, he was elected to the council of the Royal Society.

Sethu Vijayakumar is the Professor of Robotics in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, UK and Director of Edinburgh Centre for Robotics (ECR). Since August 2007, he holds the prestigious Senior Research Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering, co-funded by Microsoft Research.  He also holds additional appointments as an Adjunct Faculty of the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles and a Visiting Research Scientist at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Japan. Prof. Vijayakumar has pioneered the use of large scale machine learning techniques in the real time control of large degree of freedom anthropomorphic robotic systems including the SARCOS and the HONDA ASIMO humanoid robots, KUKA-DLR robot arm and iLIMB prosthetic hand. He is the author of over 150 highly cited publications in these fields and the winner of the IEEE Vincent Bendix award, the Japanese Monbusho fellowship, 2013 IEEE Transaction on Robotics King Sun Fu Award and several paper awards from leading conferences. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a keen science communicator with a significant annual outreach agenda.

Katherine J. Kuchenbecker is an Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics at the University of Pennsylvania, with a secondary appointment in Computer and Information Science. Her research centres on the dual problems of creating robotic technology that can deliver realistic haptic feedback to human users and enabling autonomous robots to understand their haptic interactions with the world. She directs the Penn Haptics Group, which is part of the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing, and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory. She has received several honours for her research, including an NSF CAREER Award in 2009, Popular Science Brilliant 10 in 2010, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Academic Early Career Award in 2012, and many best paper and best demonstration awards. Prior to becoming a professor, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Johns Hopkins University, and she earned her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University in 2006.

Nicholas Roy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. He received his Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2003. His research interests include autonomous robots, unmanned air vehicles, human-computer interaction, decision-making under uncertainty and machine learning. In addition to his academic research, he spent two years, from 2012-2014, as the founder of Project Wing at Google[x].

Peter Corke is a professor of robotic vision at Queensland University of Technology, and Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision. His research is concerned with enabling robots to see, and the application of robots to mining, agriculture and environmental monitoring. He is a fellow of the IEEE, former editor-in-chief of the IEEE Robotics & Automation magazine, founding and associate editor of the Journal of Field Robotics, founding multi-media editor and editorial board member of the International Journal of Robotics Research, member of the editorial advisory board of the Springer Tracts on Advanced Robotics series, recipient of the Qantas/Rolls-Royce and Australian Engineering Excellence awards, and has held visiting positions at Oxford, University of Illinois, Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Pennsylvania.  He received his undergraduate and Masters Degrees in electrical engineering and PhD from the University of Melbourne.

Paul Newman is the BP Professor of Information Engineering at the University of Oxford and an EPSRC Leadership Fellow. He heads the Mobile Robotics Group (mrg.robots.ox.ac.uk) within the Department of Engineering Science which enjoys a world leading reputation in mobile autonomy - developing machines, robots and cars which map, navigate through and understand their environments. His focus lies on pushing the boundaries of navigation and autonomy techniques in terms of both endurance and scale. The Mobile Robotics Group has developed a keen focus on intelligent transport for example the RobotCar www.robotcar.org.uk and enjoys collaborations with many industrial partners which provide exploitation opportunities to drive the research. He is on the board of the Robotics Science and Systems Foundation, the International Journal of Robotics Research and the Journal of Field Robotics. He is an inaugural member of the BIS UK Robotics and Autonomous Systems Special Interest Group and sits on the Scientific Advisory Council for the UK Department of Transport. In September 2014, he was elected fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering with a citation for outstanding contributions to robot navigation.

Brad Nelson is the Professor of Robotics and Intelligent Systems at ETH Zürich. His primary research focus is on microrobotics and nanorobotics emphasizing applications in biology and medicine. He received a B.S.M.E. from the University of Illinois and an M.S.M.E. from the University of Minnesota. He has been at Honeywell and Motorola and served as a United States Peace Corps Volunteer in Botswana, Africa, before obtaining a Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 1995. He was Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago (1995-1998) and Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota (1998-2002). He became Full Professor at ETH Zürich in 2002. He has received a number of awards and serves on several editorial boards. He has been Department Head of Mechanical and Process Engineering, Chairman of the ETH Electron Microscopy Center, and is a member of the Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation.