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U. Edinburgh
Informatics
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 Professor Sethu
Vijayakumar FRSE holds a
Personal Chair in Robotics
within the
School of Informatics at the University
of Edinburgh and is the Director of the
Edinburgh Centre for
Robotics and co-Programme
Director of AI for The Alan
Turing Institute. Since 2007, he holds the Senior Research
Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering, co-funded by
Microsoft Research and is also an
Adjunct
Faculty of the
University of Southern California (USC), Los
Angeles and a Visiting Research Scientist
at the
ATR
Computational Neuroscience Labs,
Kyoto-Japan. He has a Ph.D.(1998) in Computer Science and Engineering from
the Tokyo Institute of Technology.
Prof. Vijayakumar previously held the position of
the Director of IPAB
(2005-2015), Reader (2007-2010) and Lecturer (2003-2007) at the
University of Edinburgh, a Research Assistant Professor
('01-'03) at USC and a Staff Scientist ('98-'00) at the
RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Tokyo. His research
interest spans a broad interdisciplinary curriculum involving basic research
in the fields of robotics, statistical machine learning, motor control,
planning and optimization in autonomous systems and computational neuroscience.
His latest project (2016) involves a collaboration with NASA Johnson
Space Centre on the Valkyrie
humanoid robot being prepared for unmanned robotic pre-deployment
missions to Mars. See here for a list of his
publications [Google
Scholar]. Sethu is a keen science communicator and in recent years,
has been active in conceptualising, producing and presenting several
public outreach events
to engage with the general public and children on all things science and
engineering. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society
of Edinburgh and the winner of the 2015 Tam Dalyell Prize
for Excellence in Engaging the Public with Science.
He is the
judge on the latest edition of
BBC Robot Wars, a hugely popular technology show as well as
involved with the
launch of the BBC micro:bit coding initiative.
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 2018
Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (RAI) Hubs : We have been
successful in winning three EPSRC funded RAI hubs focusing on real world
challenges in the Offshore (Offshore Robotics for Certification of
Assets (ORCA)), Space (FAIR-SPACE) and Nuclear (NCNR)
domains -- with overall investment of over £32M across our
academic partners (Heriot-Watt, Oxford, Imperial, Surrey, Liverpool
etc.). More details
here and open positions below.
Postdoctoral Researchers:
We have several senior Research Fellowships (PDRAs:
UE07 Spine 34, 3 yrs)
starting immediately, aimed at candidates who have a PhD (or submitted),
with a world leading track record in the areas of motor control
and multi-contact motion planning, humanoid and quadruped
locomotion, shared autonomy interfaces and optimal control
in dynamic environments. Deadline: June 1, 2018 (Apply)
We are also
hiring a Senior Lab Manager (UE08, Spine 37, 3 yrs), with skills in
hardware and software maintenance.
Studentships: Are you passionate
about Robotics? Interested in a fully funded PhD with us on topics such
as Machine Learning for Robotics, Humanoid and
Anthropomorphic Robot planning, sensing and control,
Prosthetics and Human Motor Control? Would you like to work
on exciting robotic platforms such as the
UoE-NASA Valkyrie Humanoid?
[News
Coverage] [Prospective PhD Students apply
here -- fully funded 4-year studentships]
June 2014: Our paper 'Robots Driven by Compliant Actuators:
Optimal Control under Actuation Constraints' has been awarded the
2013 IEEE Transactions on Robotics Best Paper Award [News] [Paper] [IEEE
site]
Edinburgh Centre for Robotics (2014): I direct our new
Centre for Excellence in
Robotics at Edinburgh, in collaboration with Heriot-Watt
University, secured through a £11.5M investment from EPSRC [news]
[EPSRC
announcement] that includes the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral
Training (CDT) in Robotics and Autonomous Systems to train
over 65 PhD students in the area.
[BBC
News Coverage of ECR, March 2015]
Conferences: I was the publicity chair for the
R:SS 2015 in Rome.
I have served as the Program/Area Chairs for various editions of R:SS,
NIPS and ICML.
Outreach: Please look at my
Outreach and Media pages for public
engagements, keynotes and media coverage.
2007: I have been
awarded the Microsoft/Royal Academy of Engineering Senior
Research Fellowship.
Check out our research home since June 2008: The
Informatics Forum, in this
video.
Edinburgh beautiful
sights!
Details
of
my research group, the Statistical Learning & Motor Control
(SLMC) lab can be accessed
here. |
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Selected Publications (for full list, see
here)
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Theodorous Stouratis,
Iordanis Chatzinikolaidis, Michael Gienger and Sethu Vijayakumar, Dyadic
collaborative Manipulation through Hybrid Trajectory Optimization,
Proc. Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL 2018), Madrid (2018). [pdf]
[link] [video]
[CoRL
2018 Best Paper Award Finalist] -
Yiming Yang, Wolfgang Merkt, Vladimir Ivan, Zhibin Li and Sethu Vijayakumar,
HDRM: A Resolution Complete Dynamic Roadmap for Real-Time Motion Planning
in Complex Environments,
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters,
vol. 3(1), pp. 551-558
(2018)
[pdf]
[DOI] [video]-
Jun Nakanishi, Andreea Radulescu, David Braun and Sethu Vijayakumar,
Spatio-temporal Stiffness Optimization with Switching Dynamics,
Autonomous Robots, vol. 41(2), pp. 273-291 (2017). [pdf][DOI] -
Wolfgang Merkt, Yiming Yang, Theodoros Stouraitis, Christopher Mower,
Maurice Fallon and Sethu Vijayakumar, Robust Shared Autonomy for Mobile
Manipulation with Continuous Scene Monitoring,
Proc. 13th
IEEE Conference on Automation Science and Engineering, Xian, China (2017).[pdf]
[video]
[First
Prize at Robots for Resilient Infrastructure Challenge 2017, Leeds, UK] (coverage)
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David Braun, Florian Petit, Felix Huber, Sami Haddadin, Patrick van der
Smagt, Alin Albu-Schffer and Sethu Vijayakumar,
Robots Driven by Compliant Actuators: Optimal Control under Actuation
Constraints,
IEEE Transactions on Robotics (IEEE T-RO), 29(5), pp. 1085-1101 (2013). [pdf]
[2013
IEEE Transactions on Robotics Best Paper
Award]-
Konrad Rawlik, Marc
Toussaint and Sethu Vijayakumar,
On Stochastic Optimal Control and Reinforcement Learning by Approximate
Inference,
Proc. Robotics: Science and Systems (R:SS 2012), Sydney, Australia
(2012). [pdf]
[R:SS 2012
Best Paper
Award Runner-up]-
Sethu Vijayakumar,
Aaron D'Souza and Stefan Schaal,
Incremental Online Learning in High Dimensions,
Neural Computation, vol. 17, no. 12, pp. 2602-2634 (2005).
[pdf] [LWPR
software] [see next for usage guide]-
Stefan Klanke, Sethu Vijayakumar and Stefan Schaal, A Library for Locally Weighted Projection Regression,
Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR), vol. 9, pp. 623--626 (2008).
[pdf][DOI]-
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