Distributed and Cognitive Robotics Focus Area
The Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) offer a Joint Doctoral Initiative in 7 cutting edge research domains.:
- Biological and Medical Imaging
- Distributed and Cognitive Robotics
- Computational and Stochastic Mathematics
- Antennas and EM devices for Wireless Applications
- Environmental Hydraulics
- Plasma Physics
- Architecture
The focus area of Distributed and Cognitive Robotics is highly interdisciplinary and involves two main research lines: (i) distributed, networked robots and (ii) cognitive personal assistant robots and devices capable of interacting with humans and understanding human actions.
- Distributed, networked robots – Recent advances in robotics, computer vision, artificial intelligence, statistical signal processing and control theory, as well as the advent of miniaturized sensors and actuators, powerful embedded processors, and wireless communication systems, have afforded engineers with the methodologies and technologies to design and build networks of autonomous robots and systems. The applications include monitoring and operations in hazardous or remote environments (ocean, space, contaminated areas, areas destroyed by natural disasters, etc), in industrial or civil engineering structures (pipeline monitoring and surveillance, bridges, dams), and in services (buildings, public areas, traffic monitoring and surveillance).
- Cognitive personal assistant robots – The massive deployment of sensors and robotic devices (e.g. smart appliances, robotic assistants) in offices, homes and urban environments, as opposed to factories, places the interaction with humans and the interpretation of human activity in a central role (e.g. ambient intelligence, health-care, surveillance). This challenge opens a new landscape of research directions in learning, human action recognition and cognition in a multidisciplinary approach involving (e.g. humanoid) robotic systems, as well as neuroscience and psychology. The research domains in this Focus Area include Human activity recognition from sensor data (e.g. video), context aware systems that can learn from observation and Learning by imitation in humanoid robotic assistants with biological inspiration.
Admitted students will share their time between Lisbon and Lausanne and will be supervised by leading experts from both institutions.
GRANTS AVAILABLE FOR OUTSTANDING CANDIDATES WORLDWIDE
Application dates (3rd call): October 4th to November 15th 2010
More information and details: www.ist.utl.pt/IST?EPFL E-mail: ist?epfl@ist.utl.pt for PhD Student Scholarships
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