报告题目: Robot genome project: An approach of artificial evolution to morphologically improve our physical robots
报告人：Prof. Fumiya Iida 英国剑桥大学
报告时间：9月8日（星期二）上午10点
报告地点：北航IRC楼 308会议室

报告内容：
The concepts and sprits of embodied artificial intelligence have been around for the last decades and demonstrated the far reaching implications for our understanding of the nature of autonomy and adaptability through the countless case studies. It is however not fully clarified methodologies with which the different aspects of embodiment can be coherently and consistently integrated into one entity of autonomous agent. In the last few years, we have been developing an approach in which embodied agents could be studied in the level of genetic encoding, rather than that of behaviors. The framework consists of a mother robot (a robotic manipulator) that is capable of handling various materials and robotic modules assembled into a variety of child robots and evaluating the behavioral performances of child robots in order to progressively improve designs over generations. Unlike the conventional evolutionary robotics research, our approach does not use mathematical modeling in the evolutionary process, we are able to explore how embodied system-environment interactions influence the dynamics of physical robot evolution by observing the mother robot “inventing” surprising solutions to the given task. By introducing our recent experiments of building over 700 individual physical robots, we will discuss the implications and challenges of our project.

报告人简介：
Fumiya Iida received his PhD degree in Informatics at University of Zurich (2006). In 2004 and 2005, he was engaged in biomechanics research of human locomotion at Locomotion Laboratory, University of Jena (Germany). From 2006 to 2009, he worked as a postdoctoral associate at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology in USA. In 2006, he awarded the Fellowship for Prospective Researchers from the Swiss National Science Foundation, and in 2009, he was appointed as a Swiss National Science Foundation Professor for bio-inspired robotics at ETH Zurich. He then joint University of Cambridge in 2014. His research interests include biologically inspired robotics, embodied artificial intelligence, and biomechanics, and he has been involved in a number of research projects related to dynamic legged locomotion, navigation of autonomous robots, and human-machine interactions. He has so far published over forty publications in major robotics journals and conferences, and edited two books. He is the current chair of IEEE, RAS Technical committee on Soft Robotics.



机电工程及自动化系