Professor Claude Sammut from the University of New South Wales, Australia, will give an invited talk “The Robot Engineeer” on Tuesday, 3 November 2015, at 14:00 in lecture room no. 3 at the Faculty of Computer and Information Science in Ljubljana.

Abstract: The Robot Engineer

With the advent of affordable 3D printing, it is possible to construct custom made tools on-demand and, with the addition of low-cost control computers, sensors and actuators, it is even possible to construct custom made robots. This ability is particularly useful when an autonomous system is required to operate in a new environment or to perform a new task. For example, in urban search and rescue, it is often difficult to anticipate how access can be gained to confined spaces and what kind of configuration is needed to for the robot to complete its tasks. Similarly, in agile manufacturing, retooling and refining automation equipment for new tasks consumes considerable resources. Reducing this cost allows manufacturers to more readily and efficiently respond to changes in the market. In this talk, we describe methods for automatically designing and constructing 3D printable tools that can be used by a robot, and also to customise robot designs so that they can be constructed on demand in response to novel and changing environments and tasks.

Claude Sammut’s brief biography

Claude Sammut is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales, Head of the Artificial Intelligence Research Group and Director of the iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research. His early work on relational learning helped to the lay the foundations for the field of Inductive Logic Programming (ILP). With Donald Michie, he also did pioneering work in Behavioural Cloning. His current research focuses on machine learning for robotics. He is a trustee of the RoboCup Federation and has mentored five championship teams in the RoboCup Standard Platform League, including the current world champions. He is a member of the editorial board of the the Machine Learning Journal and is co-editor-in-chief of Springer's Encyclopedia of Machine Learning.