Distinguished Lecturers

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Dikai Liu

University of Technology Sydney
Sydney, Australia

Dikai Liu is a distinguished professor and Director of the Robotics Institute at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Australia. His current research interest is robotics with the focus on perception, planning, human-robot collaboration and robotic systems. He has published many papers in IEEE Transactions including T-RO, T-ASE, T-Mech and T-BME and IJRR. Besides conducting fundamental robotics research, he has also been transforming robotics research to industry applications, including autonomous robots for steel bridge maintenance, bio-inspired climbing robots for inspection of confined space, intelligent robotic co-worker for human-robot collaborative abrasive blasting, smart hoist for patient transfer, and autonomous robots for underwater structure maintenance. Since 2006, his research has received over 20 best paper and research/engineering excellence awards, including the 2019 ASME DED Leonardo da Vinci Award, the 2019 UTS Medal for Research Impact, the 2019 BHERT Award, the 2016 Australian Engineering Excellence Awards (AEEA) and the 2015 Asia Pacific ICT Alliance (APICTA) Award. Part of his research outcomes has been translated to industry applications, including autonomous bridge maintenance robots commercialized by SABRE Autonomous Solutions, a climbing robot deployed for confined space inspection, underwater robots for bridge pile maintenance, and multi-robot systems for automated container handling.

Talk #1

Infrastructure Robotics – Autonomous Robots for Civil Infrastructure Maintenance

Maintaining civil infrastructure assets, including bridges, water main pipes, transmission towers and underwater structures, has been strictly constrained by humans’ limits and health/safety requirements. The need for safe, efficient and effective maintenance has led to a desire to automate maintenance operations. Intelligent robots that can operate either autonomously or collaboratively with humans in a complex infrastructure environment provide a very promising solution. However, developing autonomous robots for such application has a number of fundamental challenges. One is the way in which a robot moves and supports itself must be appropriate to the type of infrastructure. Another challenge is how the robot can operate autonomously because remote control of maintenance robots is not feasible due to the complexity of the environment and the difficulty of controlling motion in real-time. This talk will first discuss the functionalities robots should have for infrastructure maintenance. Research challenges and methodologies, including sensing, perception, planning, robot design and system integration, will then be discussed. A number of case studies of autonomous robots in practical industry applications will be presented, including autonomous robots for maintenance of steel bridges, power transmission towers and underwater structures, and robot teams for material and cargo handling.

Talk #2

Physical Human-Robot Collaboration (pHRC) – Research Challenges and Applications

Current applications of robotics is distinguished from more traditional automation by the focus on robots that operate autonomously in unstructured and dynamic environments, or collaboratively with humans. There has been increasing interest in the use of intelligent robots that can interact, assist and collaborate with humans. However, a number of key research challenges need to be addressed before robotic systems can be deployed to physically collaborate with human co-workers with varying strengths and in typically unstructured industrial environments. This talk will first discuss challenges of research on physical human-robot collaboration (pHRC), then the development of intelligent robotic coworkers that physically collaborate with humans performing labour intensive tasks such as abrasive blasting and patient handling. Topics include (1) assistance-as-needed paradigm; (2) control methods of robotic co-workers; (3) safety framework for physical human-robot collaboration; (4) brain-robot interface for intuitive human-robot collaboration; (5) modelling of human performance in pHRC; (6) development of robotic co-workers: an Assistance-as- Needed roBot (ANBOT) and a Smart Hoist