Event
Booz Allen Colloquium: "Visual Guidance of Flight in Bees & Birds, & Applications to Robotics
Friday, March 1, 2013
3:00 p.m.
Kim Engineering Building, Rm. 1110
Carrie Hilmer
301 405 4470
chilmer@umd.edu
http://www.ece.umd.edu/colloquium
Booz Allen Hamilton Distinguished Colloquium in Electrical and Computer Engineering
Co-sponsored by Lockheed Martin and the University of Maryland Robotics Center
"Visual Guidance of Flight in Birds and Bees, and Applications to Robotics"
Professor Mandyam Srinivasan
Queensland Brain Institute
The University of Queensland
Abstract:
Insects and birds are remarkably adept at seeing and perceiving the world, and flying rapidly and safely through densely cluttered environments. This talk will describe how vision is used to control flight speed, avoid obstacles, regulate altitude, maintain a stable attitude, determine flight direction, estimate distance flown, avoid collisions with other flying objects, and orchestrate smooth landings. Some of these strategies are being used to design biologically-inspired algorithms for the guidance of autonomous aerial vehicles. Applications to manoeuvres such as obstacle avoidance, terrain following, automated landing, and the execution of extreme aerobatic manoeuvres will be described.
Biography:
Srinivasan's research focuses on the principles of visual processing, perception and cognition in simple natural systems, and on the application of these principles to machine vision and robotics.
He holds an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from Bangalore University, a Master's degree in Electronics from the Indian Institute of Science, a Ph.D. in Engineering and Applied Science from Yale University, a D.Sc. in Neuroethology from the Australian National University, and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Zurich. Srinivasan is presently Professor of Visual Neuroscience at the Queensland Brain Institute and the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering of the University of Queensland. Among his awards are Fellowships of the Australian Academy of Science, of the Royal Society of London, and of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World, the 2006 Australia Prime Ministers Science Prize, the 2008 U.K. Rank Prize for Optoelectronics, the 2009 Distinguished Alumni Award of the Indian Institute of Science, and the Membership of the Order of Australia (AM) in 2012.
