Event

Lockheed Martin Robotics Seminar: Panagiotis Artemiadis, "Advanced Human-Robot Control"

Friday, November 4, 2016
1:00 p.m.
2121 JM Patterson
Ania Picard
301 405 4358
appicard@umd.edu

Lockheed Martin Robotics Seminar

Advanced Human-Robot Control and Interaction Interfaces

Panagiotis Artemiadis

Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Director of the Human-Oriented Robotics and Control (HORC) Lab
School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy
Arizona State University

Host
Derek Paley

Abstract
This talk will focus on interfaces between humans and robotic platforms. The first part of the talk will present current work at the Human-Oriented Robotics and Control (HORC) Lab in ASU on myoelectric control interfaces used for controlling robotic devices. A novel method for robust myoelectric control of robots will be presented. This work supports a shift in myoelectric control schemes towards proportional simultaneous controls learned through development of unique muscle synergies. The ability to enhance, retain, and generalize control, without needing to recalibrate or retrain the system, supports control schemes promoting synergy development, not necessarily user-specific decoders trained on a subset of existing synergies, for efficient myoelectric interfaces designed for long-term use. The second part of the talk will focus on the design and characterization of a novel system, called Variable Stiffness Treadmill (VST) developed in the HORC Lab in ASU. The device is capable of controlling load feedback stimulus by regulating the walking surface stiffness in real time. The high range of available stiffness, the resolution and accuracy of the device, as well as the ability to regulate stiffness within the stance phase of walking, are some of the unique characteristics of the VST. A novel approach to robotic interventions, which takes advantage of mechanisms of inter-limb coordination, will be presented. The methods and results of the presented approach will lay the foundation for model-based rehabilitation strategies for impaired walkers, which is supported by a mathematical model that accurately describes the relationship between the magnitude of the stiffness perturbation and the evoked muscle activity. Finally, a novel control interface between humans and multi-agent systems will be presented. The human user will be in control of a swarm of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and will be able to provide high-level commands to these agents. The proposed brain-machine interface between the swarm and the user will allow for research on swarm high-level information perception, leading to augmentation of decision capabilities for the state-of-the-art systems.

Biography
Panagiotis (Panos) Artemiadis received the Diploma and the Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece, in 2003 and 2009, respectively. From 2007-2009 he worked as Visiting Researcher in Brown University and the Toyota Technological Institute in Chicago. From 2009 to 2011, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Mechanical Engineering Department, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Since 2011, he has been with Arizona State University, where he is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department, and the Director of the Human-Oriented Robotics and Control Laboratory (http://horc.engineering.asu.edu/). His research interests include the areas of robotics, control systems, system identification, brain–machine interfaces and human–swarm interaction. He serves as Editor-in-Chief and Associate Editor in many scientific journals and scientific committees, three of his papers have been nominated or awarded best paper awards, while he has received many awards for his research and teaching (more info at http://www.public.asu.edu/~partemia/.). He is the recipient of the 2014 DARPA Young Faculty Award and the 2014 AFOSR Young Investigator Award.