18th Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation, June 23-25, 2010, Congress Palace, Marrakech, Morocco

About The 18th Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation, MED'10, will be held for the first time in Marrakech, Morocco, at the Hotel Mansour Eddahbi - Palais des Congres . Marrakech the red city, the enchantress, is above all an imperial city. Located in a plain gained on the desert and leaned with the majestic snow-covered mountains at the High Atlas, this large oasis is today an economic pole and one of the Moroccan tourist destinations, thanks to its history and to its adapted hotel infrastructure. Between tradition and modernity, between the Medina of another age and European Neighbourhoods, this city has what to disconcert the tourist through time. Make sure to visit the famous Djemma el Fna, the heart of Marrakech. This large central square in the old city (Medina) transforms from a shopping heaven into an entertainment paradise in the afternoon -the square really comes alive. The souks of Marrakech are considered to be among the best in Morocco .

Topics

Adaptive control Aerospace control Agents & agent-based systems Biologically inspired systems, control Bond Graph Computational intelligence Computer controlled systems Computing & communications Decentralized control Discrete event systems Distributed systems Education & training Embedded control systems Fault diagnosis Fault tolerant Control Fuzzy systems Genetic & evolutionary computation Hybrid systems Image processing Industrial automation, manufacturing Intelligent control systems

Intelligent transportation systems Linear systems Micro and nano systems Modeling & simulation Neural networks Networked control systems Non-linear systems Optimization Petri nets Power systems Predictive control Process control Real-time control Renewable energy and sustainability Robotics Robust control Spectral estimation Swarms Robotics Unmanned Systems Virtual reality Wireless sensor networks

Computer Program Allows Car to Stay in Its Lane Without Human Control

Researchers from North Carolina State University have created a computer program that allows a car to stay in its lane without human control, opening the door to the development of new automobile safety features and military applications that could save lives.

"We develop computer vision programs, which allow a computer to understand what a video camera is looking at -- whether it is a stop sign or a pedestrian. For example, this particular program is designed to allow a computer to keep a car within a lane on a highway, because we plan to use the program to drive a car," says Dr. Wesley Snyder, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the research. "Although there are some vision systems out there already that can do lane finding, our program maintains an awareness of multiple lanes and traffic in those lanes."

Specifically, Snyder and his co-authors have written a program that uses algorithms to sort visual data and make decisions related to finding the lanes of a road, detecting how those lanes change as a car is moving, and controlling the car to stay in the correct lane.

"This research has many potential uses," Snyder says, "such as the development of military applications related to surveillance, reconnaissance and transportation of materials.

"This computer vision technology will also enable the development of new automobile safety features, including systems that can allow cars to stay in their lane, avoid traffic and gracefully react to emergency situations -- such as those where a driver has fallen asleep at the wheel, had a heart attack or gone into diabetic shock. This can help protect not only the car that has the safety feature, but other drivers on the road as well. That's a next generation of this research."

Source: North Carolina State University (2010, April 7). Computer program allows car to stay in its lane without human control. ScienceDaily. Retrieved

Lessons From a Mechanical Child (Audio Slide Show)

A child humanoid robot called iCub is helping Swiss scientists at EPFL's Learning Algorithms and Systems Laboratory study cognition, learning, and mobility.





http://spectrum.ieee.org

INDUSTRY AUTOMATIC CONTROL FUNDAMENTALS

I found this webpage some days ago. It has an interesting content especially for people that are not very experienced in Industry Automatic Control. Just check it...

iCub the robot helps scientists understand humans

Robots that can make their own decisions have so far been confined to science fiction movies, but a child-sized figure with big eyes and a white face is trying hard to turn fiction into reality.Its name is iCub and scientists are hoping it will learn how to adapt its behavior to changing circumstances, offering new insights into the development of human consciousness.

Six versions of iCub exist in laboratories across Europe, where scientists are painstakingly tweaking its electronic brain to make it capable of learning, just like a human child.

"Our goal is to really understand something that is very human: the ability to cooperate, to understand what somebody else wants us to do, to be able to get aligned with them and work together," said research director Peter Ford Dominey.

iCub is about 1 meter (3.2 feet) high, with an articulated trunk, arms and legs made up of intricate electronic circuits. It has a white face with the hint of a nose and big round eyes that can see and follow moving objects.

"Shall we play the old game or play a new one?" iCub asked Dominey during a recent experiment at a laboratory in Lyon, in southeastern France. Its voice was robotic, unsurprisingly, though it did have the intonation of a person asking a question.The "game" consisted of one person picking up a box, revealing a toy that was placed underneath. Then another person picked up the toy, before putting it down again. Finally, the first person put the box back down, on top of the toy.

Having watched two humans perform this action, iCub was able to join in the fun.

"The robot is demonstrating that it can change roles. It can play the role of either the first person in the interaction or the second," said Dominey, who receives European Union funding for his work with iCub.

MOTHER'S LITTLE HELPER

While such simple pastimes may seem disappointing to fans of C-3PO, the robot in Star Wars movies who boasts he is fluent in more than six million forms of communication, they are at the cutting edge of robotics and of clear interest to science.

"These robots will be a huge tool for analytical philosophy and philosophy of mind," said Dominey, whose background is in computational neuroscience -- in layman's terms, building computer models for different brain functions.

Dominey said after years of research he had understood that such models needed to be "unleashed into the world" and given vision and motor-control in order to interact with humans.

"Is perception consciousness? The ability to understand that somebody has a goal, is that consciousness?" he asked.

"These kinds of questions, we will be able to ask with much more precision because we can have a test bed, this robot, or zombie, that we can use to implement things," he said, describing working with iCub as "an outstanding pleasure."

Away from such highbrow concerns, the aim is also to develop iCub so that it can have practical applications.

In the short term, that could mean using it in hospitals to help patients in need of physiotherapy by playing games with them. In the longer term, iCub could gain enough autonomy to help around the house, making its own assessments of needs.

"People have their habits, loading their dishwasher, putting away their dishes ... The goal is that the robot can become like a helper ... just like a polite apprentice visitor would come into your house and begin to help you," said Dominey.

Anyone looking to cut down on their household chores will need to be patient, however.

"It won't be for tomorrow. It's maybe in the next decade we will begin to see this kind of thing," said the scientist.

(Writing by Estelle Shirbon, editing by Paul Casciato)

http://www.reuters.com/

Wrestling with robot snakes

Snake robots are not only cool, but potentially very useful. Most groups building them hope to send them into disaster zones to locate people stranded in fallen buildings. A robot with a snake-style body can climb over small and large obstacles, and wriggle through small gaps better than other type of robot.

But they are quite a handful to control ? as Johann Borenstein explained in his keynote speech at a recent meeting on rescue robotics. He built the snake robot in the video below ? called OmniTread ? and as you can see, it takes more than one operator to get it to climb through a fairly simple obstacle. I asked him a few questions about the challenge of operating snake robots.

NS: How many people are needed to control OmniTread?

JB: We currently need three operators. Each operator controls two joints of our six-joint OmniTread. Typically all joints need to be controlled at all times. Special cases [where only one controller is needed] such as driving straight along a long stretch of flat terrain, are rare.

NS: What do the operators have to do?

JB: Each joint has two degrees of freedom (i.e. controllable angles). Each operator controls one joint with one joystick on a commercial two-joystick game controller.

NS: Do all snake robots have this problem?

JB: Any snake-type robot that has many controllable joints will have that problem. It requires sophisticated software to address the very difficult control problem. I did develop a hardware-based control device that requires only one operator to control the OmniTread. A brief description of this unique device, called "Joysnake" is downloadable (pdf).



Source: www.newscientist.com

coca cola robots invade japan

Those fortunate enough to live in Tokyo have recently sighted lifesize Coca-Cola robots wandering the streets. Now you can own your own miniature version of the wandering Coke robot for your desktop.

Combining robotics, Japanimation and caffeination, the Coca-Cola vending machine robot is the perfect embodiment of all things geeky.

Source: www.technabob.com

Micro-robots for micro-manufacturing

An EU-funded consortium has built tiny robots capable of handling objects less than 100nm in size, as part of an effort to develop tools for manufacturing nanoscale devices.

The group, called NanoHand, has built two micro-robotic demonstrators that can automatically pick up and install carbon nanotubes. Thousands of times thinner than a human hair, carbon nanotubes are rolled up sheets of carbon just a few tens of nanometres in diameter, and they could become an essential part of the nanotechnologist’s construction kit.

"The handling and characterisation of these objects has become more and more important in materials science and nanotechnology," said nano-researcher Volkmar Eichhorn of the University of Oldenburg and its associated institute, OFFIS. "They have a huge application potential in various products."

The trouble is that nanotubes are too thin to see with a normal optical microscope. In addition, at this scale the intermolecular forces between objects are stronger than gravity, so once a nanotube has been picked up it will stick to the jaws of the gripper and cannot easily be dropped into position. The NanoHand team has had to develop novel pick-and-place techniques to get around this problem.

The robots, about two centimetres in size, work inside a scanning electron microscope, allowing an observer to follow their activities. Each has a microgripper that can make precise and delicate movements, using an electrothermal principle to open and close its tweezer-like jaws.

"The jaws open to about two micrometres and can pick up objects less than 100 nanometres in size. “[It is] really able to grip micro or even nano objects," Eichhorn said. "We have handled objects down to tens of nanometres.

"World-wide, we are the first project that has really realised the automated microgripper-based pick-and-place experiments," he added. "The new thing is the high accuracy and the small scale of the objects – in the range of tens or hundreds of nanometres – and the excellent control and software architecture being built around this whole set-up facilitating a high degree of automation."

Other groups are working on methods of handling nanotubes, especially in the USA, Japan and China, but the NanoHand system of microrobots and microgrippers is proving effective and reliable, claimed Eichhorn. "It’s very promising for nanotechnology applications," he said.

The first product built using NanoHand technology is already on the market - a scanning electron microscope with a carbon nanotube added to its tip to give it much improved resolution.

Now the project's industrial partners, who include STMicroelectronics, are looking at other potential applications, such as using carbon nanotubes for the interconnects within silicon chips. Because of their high electrical conductivity, carbon nanotubes dissipate less heat than copper and allow circuits to be packed more densely.

NanoHand received funding from the ICT strand of the EU’s Sixth Framework Programme for research. The project participants include British, Czech, Danish, German, Italian and Swiss organisations.

Source:http://kn.theiet.org

Is Albert Einstein robot too human? Everything’s relative

Albert Einstein has been re-created as a robot, right down to the unruly hair and luxuriant moustache, but the electronic version is no genius by human standards.

While it would be no use at proving the physicist’s unified field theory, the robot Einstein is extraordinary in that it can recognise and respond to human emotions.

This head-and-shoulders creation could shape mankind’s interaction with robots and determine just how human-like future robots should be.

Scientists also hope that it will ensure the development of empathetic robots, thus avoiding conflicts between man and machine.

The Einstein robot was designed by David Hanson, president of a Texas robotics company. The face was moulded from a flesh-like material called Frubber, which Mr Hanson engineered right down to its microscopic skin pores. It is manipulated by 31 motors around its mouth and eyes. The head was originally placed on top of a robot body in collaboration with the Kaist Hubo robotics group of Korea, forming a strange hybrid of physicist and angular white humanoid.

Einstein can recognise hundreds of facial expressions including sadness, anger, fear, happiness and confusion, as well as cues suggesting age and gender.

Scientists at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology at UC San Diego have introduced software to allow it to interact “naturally” with humans. The robot, which cost more than $75,000 (£50,000) to create, might turn its head, raise its eyebrows and smile. Javier Movellan, a research scientist at the university’s Machine Perception Laboratory, said that the effect could be startling.

It is hoped that the robot may help to teach children with autism better communication skills, and to improve intelligent tutoring systems, in which robots or avatars teach students. A key area of research will be the question of how closely robots should resemble humans. It appears that the more human-like the robot, the more uncomfortable it makes people feel.

This dilemma is crucial to robotics, which seeks to allow humans to interact with robots in a natural way. Mr Hanson said: “Some scientists believe strongly that very human-like robots are so inherently creepy that people can never get over it and interact with them normally.”

The goal is to develop a creative, intelligent machine that rivals or exceeds a human level of intelligence — and does so without compromising humanity.

“If things go really well, we’re maybe ten years away from that happening,” Mr Hanson said. “But it’s very important that we develop empathic machines, machines that have compassion, machines that understand what you’re feeling. If these robots do become as intelligent as human beings, we want this infrastructure of compassion and empathy to be in place so the machines are prepared to use their intellectual powers for the good of civilisation. In a way, we’re planting the seeds for the survival of humanity.”

Source:http://technology.timesonline.co.uk

Crowdsourcing the Complexities of Electronic Design Automation

Researchers develop an online game that may one day help chipmakers improve their designs.

(I tested this game - it is interesting after the 10th level).

Electronic design automation (EDA) is full of large, intricate problems. Figuring out the best way to arrange transistors on a chip, for example, becomes exponentially more complex as the number of transistors increases. Computer scientists have made great strides in developing algorithms that can solve many of these problems, but a team of researchers at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, believes that the industry could benefit from a different resource: human intuition.

“These kinds of problems are difficult for computers to solve. We started by thinking, ‘How can humans help electronic design automation?’ ” says Valeria Bertacco, an associate professor in computer science and engineering. She and Andrew DeOrio, a doctoral student, have developed an online game that challenges players to take on a type of problem common in design automation. They presented their idea of human-assisted problem solving today at the Design Automation Conference, in San Francisco.

In large, complex EDA problems, there are initially millions of possible paths to a solution. It’s similar to a maze: At the beginning, you have to pick an initial path to explore and see where it leads. The problem for designers is that the number of solution paths increases exponentially with the number of variables. Even the best algorithms can get tripped up if they start down a search path with no possible solution.

Source: spectrum.ieee.org

Why Automatic Control, why Robots?

Robots and automatic controllers are the contemporary slaves of humanity. These devices relieve people from the mechanical movements that sterilizing their minds (...so they have plenty of time to activate their brains by watching soap operas or take some "how not to think" lessons!!!). The car you drive, is moving because of robots and the bottle of the coke that you drink is made by such a device also. If we could manufacture devices with a tiny percentage of human intelligence, perhaps we could call ourselves "Little Gods". Many people talk about intelligent systems but the truth is that we are far from the "real" intelligent systems age. The basic fundamental problems in the control theory have been solved but what about intelligent controllers? Controllers that can take their own decisions depending on the case they are in to. This is one of the most significant challenges in the history of control. Devices that are able to think without the human direct effect. Devices-controllers that can produce new knowledge based on the existing one in which they have access to. Controllers that will act based on this knowledge which evolves with time.

But it is important to remember that the existing Control Theory is the base for these new controllers.