Vancouver Chapter to host RAS Distinguished Lecturer
IEEE Joint Chapter of Control Systems Society, Robotics and Automation Society, and Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society in the Vancouver Section with the support from the RAS Distinguished Lecturer program presents:
PAL Robotics: History, Research Activities and Collaboration Opportunities
Speaker: Dr. Francesco Ferro, PAL Robotics, Barcelona, Spain
Abstract: PAL Robotics is a robotics R & D company with a multi-national team from across the world, working specially in the humanoid robotics field. PAL Robotics has developed several humanoid robots: the biped REEM-A, REEM-B and the last creation REEM-C, and other with a mobile base, REEM-H1 and REEM. Its diverse team consists of people from various countries, mostly mechanic, electronic and software engineers with many years of experience in the robotics industry. The presentation consists of three main topics that will be explained in the following lines. Firstly, the history of the company and the several robots already developed will be introduced. The goals of the company, the strong relationship with the investors and the different humanoid robotics platforms and their characteristics will be also presented. Secondly, a selection of research lines will be showed. Navigation, walking, grasping, human robot interaction as well as hardware features will be presented. Finally, the different ways of collaboration with the company will be dealt: internships, co-advising master/PhD thesis, PhD programs, FP7 projects, etc. At the end some performance about REEMs events will be shown.
Speaker’s bio: Francesco Ferro obtained a BSc degree in Telecommunications Engineering in 2002 at the Politecnico di Torino. He began a PhD in Computer Vision but left it in 2004 to attend a robotics humanoid project, where he still works on. He started the development of stereo vision algorithms and later he joined the autonomous robot navigation team to implement various SLAM algorithms. In 2008 he became the manager of the software department of PAL. He obtained an MBA at the UB University in Barcelona in the 2011. From the beginning of the 2011 he is the CEO of PAL Robotics, in charge of REEM's humanoids robots development.
