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Research Vision

Here you can get a brief idea about the scientific research I am interested in. I keep editing this page, adding new topics where I diversify, etc. If you would like to know more, please go through my publications or the projects I am/was involved in.

• Sensor Fusion - Arguably, this is perhaps one of the most celebrated research areas among roboticists of all times. My focus is to study and develop unified methods for sensor fusion that are not only scalable to large environments but also simultaneously to a large number of sensors.
• Robot Vision - Target tracking, robot localization and mapping using robotic vision is my primary focus. At the same time, I am interested in studying cameras that follow non-conventional projection models, e.g., fisheye lens-based cameras that follow equidistant projection. Their non-conventional optics fascinates me and leads me to believe they can be exploited for far more efficient and elegant vision algorithms than the current state-of-the-art.
• Human-Robot Interaction - The human factor in successful real-world deployment of robotic systems is undeniable. Whether it concerns remotely operating robots or dealing one-to-one with an assistant robot in a public place, interaction not only needs to be natural for humans but also cost effective for the robotic system such that their performance in real time is guaranteed. The issue is further amplified when we consider human interaction with multi-robot systems and in large environments. My research focus is to study how i) the naturalness of human-robot interaction and ii) scalability of multi-robot functionalities, are correlated and to develop unified methods that efficiently handle the trade-offs between the aforementioned.

Research Projects

• RoCKIn: Robot Competitions Kick Innovation in Cognitive Systems and Robotics (FP7-EU-601012) [Quoted from the project's website] “RoCKIn is an EU project that will be run over the next three years (2013-2016), consisting of robot competitions, symposiums, educational RoCKIn camps and technology transfer workshops. The mission is to act as a catalyst for smarter, more dependable robots. It is done by building upon the principles of challenge-driven innovation laid down by RoboCup, facilitating cognitive and networked robot systems' testing, and streamlining research and development through standardised testbeds and benchmarks. For this there are two challenges which will run concurrently in 2014 and 2015 with an introductory event to be held in June 2013. These challenges were selected due to their high relevance and impact on Europe's societal and industrial needs.” http://rockinrobotchallenge.eu/

• PCMMC: Perception-Driven Coordinated Multi-Robot Motion Control (FCT PTDC/EEA-CRO/100692/2008) [Quoted from the project's wiki] Several robotic tasks require or benefit from the cooperation of multiple robots: transportation of large-size objects, large area coverage (e.g., for cleaning) or surveillance (e.g., for fire detection), pollutant plume tracking, or target detection and tracking, to name but a few. In this project, a novel active approach to cooperative perception through coordinated vehicle motion control is proposed. The vehicle formation geometry will change dynamically so as to optimize the accuracy of cooperative perception of a static or dynamic target by the formation vehicles. To achieve this, innovative decentralized low-communication formation full state estimation methods, and dynamic-goal-driven formation control, for cooperative target localization and tracking by decentralized fusion of the data measured by all the formation vehicles have been introduced. http://mediawiki.isr.ist.utl.pt/wiki/PCMMC:_Perception-Driven_Coordinated_Multi-Robot_Motion_Control

• URUS: Ubiquitous Networking Robotics in Urban Settings [Quoted from the project's website] In this project the idea of incorporating a network of robots (robots, intelligent sensors, devices and communications) in order to improve life quality in urban areas was analyzed and tested. The URUS project was focused in designing a network of robots that in a cooperative way interact with human beings and the environment for tasks of assistance, transportation of goods, and surveillance in urban areas. Specifically, the objective was to design and develop a cognitive network robot architecture that integrates cooperating urban robots, intelligent sensors, intelligent devices and communications. http://urus.upc.es/

• SocRob [Quoted from the project's website] SocRob is a project on Cooperative Robotics and Multi-Agent Systems carried out by the Intelligent Systems Laboratory at ISR/IST. The acronym of the project stands both for “Society of Robots” and “Soccer Robots”, the case study where we are testing our population of four robots. http://socrob.isr.ist.utl.pt/