CS Colloq: Biomimetic Legged Locomotion and Odor Guided Behavior for Humanitarian Landmine Detectio

Title: Biomimetic Legged Locomotion and Odor Guided Behavior for Humanitarian Landmine DetectionSpeaker: Dr. Thrishantha Nanayakkara (Harvard) Abstract:
Humanitarian demining is a pre-requisite to the economic revival of many affected countries like Angola, Afghanistan, Mozambique, Kosovo, Cambodia, Sri Lanka etc. My current research efforts make an attempt to find answers to three fundamental questions: 1. How a trace of explosives can be localized using a sensory signal gradient leading to the source 2. How a robotic platform can guide such a sensor under ground contact force constraints (to avoid detonating mines) in an unstructured environment with soft terrain conditions like in an abandoned mine field 3. How a colony of such robots and sensors can adaptively re-organize their collective behaviors to identify the locations of the explosive traces in the most efficient manner. The talk elaborates a project in progress in Sri Lanka in collaboration with the Harvard University to find answers to the above questions. The current focus is on a heterogeneous system of trained rodents, field robots, and human experts to detect landmines in an unstructured forest environment. A salient feature of the proposed system is that each sub-system (robots, animals, and humans) improve their individual capabilities by interacting with each other while performing an area coverage operation in a minefield.Biography:
Thrishantha was born in 1970 in Galle, Sri Lanka. He graduated with a first class honors degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Moratuwa in 1996. He secured the MSc degree in Electrical Engineering in 1998 and the PhD degree in Systems Control and Robotics from Saga University in 2001. From 2001 ¡V 2003 he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore (www.bme.jhu.edu/~reza ). From 2003 to date, he has been in the faculty of the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. He is the principle investigator of the ¡§laboratory for intelligent field robots¡¨ at the Department of Mechanical Engineering (www.mrt.ac.lk/iarc/thrish ). He has been awarded the outstanding researcher award of the University of Moratuwa in 2006. He has published 4 book chapters, 7 international journal papers, and 26 international conference papers. He was the founding general Chair of the International Conference on Information and Automation with technical co-sponsorship of IEEE region 10. At present he is a research fellow in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, USA. Keywords: Field robots for landmine detection, animal-robot cooperation, adaptive control, reinforcement based learning, fuzzy and neural network based control, evolutionary optimization.

Location: Charles Lee Powell Hall (PHE) - 223

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: CS Colloquia