Experiments on alternative locomotion techniques for micro-robots

Where: Room 304 (Campus Jussieu)
When: 2:00PM
Host: Nicolas Bredeche

In this informal talk I will describe some experiments on alternative 
methods of locomotion for micro or macro objects not using wheels or 
other electro-mechanical methods – in particular, the idea is to harness 
vibrations from the environment and coupling it with internal degrees of 
freedom of the system using machine learning. These techniques, along 
others now being studied can be extended to study swarming robots as 
well as control the vibration phase of the quantum hydrodynamic walkers.

The talk will not be theoretical in nature, but rather experimental and 
based on computer simulations – my background is quite particular I hold 
a PhD from Paris XI on Optoelectronic Stochastic Parallel Processors and 
I worked for 15 years as director of a human computer and robotics 
laboratory at the University of Tokyo (and as an independent Media 
Artist…). That is to say, I very much look forward your feedback as 
well as learn from you!