Event
Maryland Robotics Center Seminar: Henrik Christensen, "A National Robotics Effort"
Friday, November 12, 2010
10:00 a.m.
1146 A.V. Williams Building
Nikhil Chopra
301 405 7011
nchopra@umd.edu
Maryland Robotics Center Seminar
From Internet to Robotics—Building a National Robotics Effort
Henrik Christensen
Georgia Institute of Technology
Host
Nikhil Chopra
Abstract
Over the last two years more than 160 people have collaborated on the formulation of a national technology roadmap for robotics. The roadmap considers key business drivers for the future of robotics, identifies some of the key missing competencies and outlines research issues to be addressed with expected milestones 5, 10 and 15 years from now. The roadmap is organized across the areas of manufacturing & logistics, medical & healthcare, and service applications. The roadmap has been presented to the congressional caucus on robotics and the White House Office of Science and Technology Planning. It formed an integral part of the vision for a new National Robotics Initiative to be considered for 2012. The roadmap process was sponsored by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) and coordinated by Henrik Christensen, GaTech. In this presentation the key observations in the national robotics roadmap will be outlined and some considerations of the future initiatives will be discussed.
Biography
Henrik I Christensen is the KUKA Chair of Robotics at Georgia Tech. He is also a distinguished professor of computing and the director of Robotics and Intelligent Machines. Dr. Christensen received his initial training in mechanical engineering and received M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Aalborg University, 1987 and 1990, respectively. Dr. Christensen has held positions at Aalborg University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania and Royal Institute of Technology prior to joining Georgia Tech. He does research on systems integration, applied estimation in robotics and human robot interaction. He has published more than 250 contributions across AI, Vision and Robotics. He serves on numerous editorial boards and is a consultant to companies and government agencies across 3 continents.
