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Humanoid robots in real environments
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Speaker: Francesco Ferro, Chief Executive Officer, PAL Robotics, Barcelona, Spain.
Abstract: One of the biggest efforts engineers have to face when designing and programming humanoid robots is to prepare them for non-controlled environments. At PAL Robotics we believe that biped humanoid platforms are the best robotics machinery to serve us in both domestic and industrial environments in the future, in order to increase people’s life quality. To achieve this goal, the team has been putting huge engineering efforts to perfect the robots’ stabilization and control. After 13 years running, PAL Robotics has gathered experience in testing the humanoid platforms in real environments that made us improve the robotic systems. Our most recent development, TALOS, groups some of the most advanced components in robotics with the PAL Robotics learned knowledge to make a step forward in robust humanoid robotics for real-world applications.
To make robots autonomous in real-world everyday spaces, they should be able to learn from their interactions within these spaces, how to best execute tasks specified by non-expert users in a safe and reliable way. To do so requires sequential decision-making skills that combine machine learning, adaptive planning and control in uncertain environments as well as solving hard combinatorial optimisation problems. Our research combines expertise in reinforcement learning, computer vision, robotic control, sim2real transfer, large multimodal foundation models and neural combinatorial optimisation to build AI-based architectures and algorithms to improve robot autonomy and robustness when completing everyday complex tasks in constantly changing environments.
VISION
The research we conduct on expressive visual representations is applicable to visual search, object detection, image classification and the automatic extraction of 3D human poses and shapes that can be used for human behavior understanding and prediction, human-robot interaction or even avatar animation. We also extract 3D information from images that can be used for intelligent robot navigation, augmented reality and the 3D reconstruction of objects, buildings or even entire cities.
Our work covers the spectrum from unsupervised to supervised approaches, and from very deep architectures to very compact ones. We’re excited about the promise of big data to bring big performance gains to our algorithms but also passionate about the challenge of working in data-scarce and low-power scenarios.
Furthermore, we believe that a modern computer vision system needs to be able to continuously adapt itself to its environment and to improve itself via lifelong learning. Our driving goal is to use our research to deliver embodied intelligence to our users in robotics, autonomous driving, via phone cameras and any other visual means to reach people wherever they may be.
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