Keynote Speakers

Mechanism Design for Robot in Italy:
historical backgrounds, achievements, and challenges

(Past IFToMM President, ASME fellow, Dr Honoris Causa)
LARM2: Laboratory of Robot Mechatronics
Dept of Industrial Engineering; University of Rome Tor Vergata
Via del Politecnico 1, 00133 Roma, Italy
email: marco.ceccarelli@uniroma2.it

Summary: Robots are designed and applied in more and more application filed in helping or substituting humans in their labour tasks and diary life. Italian community has contributed and still give challenging solutions. Achievements in Mechanism Design for Robots are developed in theoretical, numerical, and design works that once implemented in engineering practice or in science applications they contribute to innovation or even they are innovation themselves both in technical-scientific and social frames. In the lecture past and modern achievements and results in Robot Design are presented through significant examples in order to stress the variety of solutions and creativity that the Italian community has provided and still provides in terms of theory and practice of technological developments as well as in terms of knowledge acquisition and formation of next generations. In addition, a survey of LARM2 activities are presented as illustrative examples of the role of Mechanism Design in Robot Design conception with new challenging features.

About the speaker: 

Marco Ceccarelli (Rome, 26 May 1958) received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from La Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, in 1988. He is Professor of Mechanics of Machines at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy, where he chairs LARM2: Laboratory of Robot Mechatronics. His research interests cover subjects of robot design, mechanism kinematics, experimental mechanics with special attention to parallel kinematics machines, service robotic devices, mechanism design, and history of machines and mechanisms whose expertise is documented by several published papers in the fields of Robotics and Mechanical Engineering. He has been visiting professor in several universities in the world. He is ASME fellow. Professor Ceccarelli serves in several Journal editorial boards and conference scientific committees. He is editor-in-chief of the MDPI journal Robotics and of the SAGE International Journal on Advanced Robotic Systems for the area on Service Robotics He is editor of the Springer book series on Mechanism and Machine Science (MMS) and History of MMS. He has been the President of IFToMM, the International Federation for the Promotion of MMS in 2008-11 and 2016-19. He has started several IFToMM sponsored conferences including (HMM) Symposium on History of Machines and Mechanisms, MEDER (Mechanism Design for Robotics) and MUSME (Multibody Systems and Mechatronics). More information at the web page: LARM2 webpage: https://larm2.ing.uniroma2.it/

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Current developments and challenges in assistance robotics

Eduardo Castillo-Castaneda

Professor, Instituto Politécnico Nacional, CICATA Unidad Querétaro,
Cerro Blanco 141, 76090-Querétaro, MEXICO
email: ecastilloca@ipn.mx

Summary: From the beginning, the fundamental objective of robotics has been to perform difficult, repetitive, or dangerous tasks, that take place inside environments with extreme conditions (temperature, toxicity, height/depth, pressure, among others) where humans can have serious physical injuries. Although robots have penetrated very well into industrial environments, there are still many challenges to face when the environment is not sufficiently structured or when the robot requires very close collaboration with humans. The most appropriate term for these applications is assistive robotics. In this session, current developments in this field and the technological challenges that will be faced in the near future will be presented, taking inspection robotics and physical rehabilitation assistance robotics as case studies.

About the speaker: 

Eduardo Castillo-Castaneda is a Mechanical Electrical Engineer, graduated from Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico in 1987. In 1994 he received his Ph.D. in Automatic Control from the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble, France. He has been invited professor at: the Mechanical Engineering Laboratory-AIST, in Tsukuba, Japan; the Tokyo Institute of Technology, in Japan; the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, in Paris, France; and the Universidad Militar Nueva Granada, in Bogotá, Colombia. In 2015, he received the Training Certificate "Leaders in Innovation" by the Royal Academy of Engineering and the University of Oxford, in the United Kingdom. He has published more than 50 papers in specialized journals in fields related with parallel robots, and medical/service robotics. He has 7 granted patents and has been the thesis director for 20 PhD students. Currently, he is member of the Technical Committee for Robotics and Mechatronics of IFToMM, the InternationalFederation for the Promotion of Mechanism and Mechanics Science. Since 2007, he is full time professor at the Instituto Politecnico Nacional, in Mexico.

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The model of Cosserat rods: a standard for modelling soft and continuum robots

Frédéric Boyer 

Professor, Laboratoire des Sciences du Numérique de Nantes (LS2N), Nantes, France

Summary: At the crossroads of rigid body mechanics and continuum mechanics, the Cosserat rod model is an ideal tool for the study of slender bodies undergoing large deformations. Initially presented as an abstract object by the Cosserat brothers, it has been applied over time to many problems in engineering sciences such as structural mechanics, where it gave birth to the geometrically exact finite element method (GE-FEM), in ocean engineering for the simulation of submarine cables, or in computer graphics, for the needs of interactive simulation. In robotics, whether for the study of hyper-redundant bioinspired locomotion, the simulation and control of non-invasive continuous medical robots, or for the design of new concepts of soft arms, it is gradually becoming a standard, comparable to the multi-body models of rigid robotics. In this talk we will present this model and some of its uses for robotics. We will start by defining a Cosserat media and the resulting beam kinematics. On this basis, we will establish the equations of the dynamics and the constitutive law of Cosserat rods. This model will then be exploited for the modeling of soft and continuous robots. The connection of Cosserat beams in a robotic architecture as well as the modeling of distributed actuation will be given special attention. On the basis of these results in modelling, we will address some the problems of simulation (shooting method, Lagrangian), and control of continuous and soft robots.

About the speaker: 

Frédéric Boyer is with the Department of Automatic Control, IMT-Atlantique, Nantes, France, and the Laboratoire des Sciences du Numérique de Nantes (LS2N).  His current research interests include bio-inspired locomotion and underwater electric sensing. Dr. Boyer received the Monpetit Prize from the Academy of Science of Paris in 2007 for his work in dynamics and the French "La Recherche Prize” in 2014, for his works on artificial electric sense. He has coordinated several national projects and one European FP7-FET project on a reconfigurable eel-like robot able to navigate with electric sense