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École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)

Posted in Consortium

Introduction

The Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) is one of the two Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology and is located in Lausanne. EPFL is ranked as Europe’s #2 and world’s #18 university in the field of “Engineering/Technology and Computer Sciences” in the 2012 academic ranking of world universities (ARWU) by Shanghai Jiao Tong University. EPFL participation will be through the Biorobotics laboratory (BIOROB). The BIOROB Lab has worked extensively on dynamical system control for articulated robots (snake-like, salamander-like, quadruped and humanoid) and for exoskeletons. It has developed several control architectures for locomotion based on the biological concepts of central pattern generators and motor primitives. The group also develops new types of robots such as amphibious salamander-like robots.

Key Personnel: Auke Ijspeert

Role of the Partner

Within this project EPFL will significantly contribute on the locomotion developments leading the activities in WP3 contributing particularly on the gait pattern generators based on neuromechanical models and on the development of effective whole body balance and stabilization schemes. EPFL will also contribute in WP6 and motion planning activities and will also provide inputs for system integration and the experimentation and validation in WP7.

Key Personnel

Prof. Auke Ijspeert (MSc, PhD) is the director of the Biorobotics Laboratory (BIOROB) in the School of Engineering and is also affiliated to the University of Southern California. His research interests are at the intersection between robotics, computational neuroscience, nonlinear dynamical systems, and machine learning. He uses numerical simulations and robots to get a better understanding of the functioning of animals, and inspiration from biology to design novel types of robots and adaptive controllers. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles (some of them in high impact journals such as Science), and is regularly invited to give presentations on these topics. His H-index is 37 (Harzing’s Publish or Perish), 23 (Scopus) and 17 (ISI, Web of Knowledge). With his colleagues, he has received the Best Paper Award at ICRA2002, the Industrial Robot Highly Commended Award at CLAWAR2005, and Best paper award at Humanoids 2007. He was the Technical Program Chair of 5 international conferences (BioADIT2004, SAB2004, AMAM2005, BioADIT2006, EPFL-LATSIS2006), and has been a program committee member of over 40 conferences. He is an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, and has acted as guest editor for the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, Autonomous Robots, and Biological Cybernetics. 

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