Abstract:
This talk presents an overarching view of the research at PUC-USM Chile concerning mobile manipulators and their application to agriculture and mining in Chile, as well as the open challenges and opportunities for research collaboration. The recent and ongoing research covers aspects such physically accurate dynamic modelling, motion control and planning, navigation and perception.
Carrying out research with expensive industrial field robots has more risks than traditional indoor robotics. Thus developing physically accurate models is essential for testing through simulations before testing motion control and navigation strategies in the field. Physically accurate dynamic models are also essential to the development of energy efficient guidance methods, which cannot be properly conceived using kinematic models. Taking into account non-permanent wheel-ground contacts and skidding is a key aspect of realistic motion models for mobile robots operating in uneven terrains. Efficiently maneuvering in tight tunnels and agricultural settings has been addressed using rapid-randomly exploring trees to discover optimal paths in combination with optimal control strategies. Load variability is another challenge that motivates the study and development of strategies for online inertial parameter estimation. Other aspects that are equally important are associated to sensing and perception for teleoperated and autonomous tasks, e.g. harvesting, localization, or material handling, to name a few. Open challenges in mobile manipulation can provide a good number of opportunities for joint research and collaboration.
Bio:
Prof. Miguel Torres-Torriti received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering from the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile (PUC Chile), in 1996 and 1998, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree from McGill University, Montreal, Canada, in 2003. He is a member of IEEE since 2001.
Between 2004 and 2005 he was Senior Applications Engineer with General Electric Chile in the implementation of the multivariable process controllers for the ENAP Bio Bio and Magallanes refineries. In 2005 he joined the Department of Electrical Engineering of the School of Engineering of PUC Chile, where he is currently Associate Professor and Director of the undergraduate program in Robotics Engineering. He has served to the community of the Faculty of Engineering in different roles as Associate Dean of Social Responsibility (2014-2016), Associate Dean of Technology (2017-2022) and currently as Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Engineering. His fields of experience comprise systems modeling and control, estimation, robot dynamics, sensors and perception. His current research projects include the development of sensing, motion planning and control strategies for mobile manipulators in agriculture and mining.