Robots are finally leaving labs and factories, where they have been confined for many years, to become part of our daily life. These robots have created new opportunities for businesses in the industrial and agricultural sectors, but also the possibility to provide more health and social care services for the benefit of the general public. Working among humans, though, poses several challenges: people can be difficult to detect or identify due to cluttered environments; they often move and act in an unpredictable way; and their intentions are not always clear. Despite all this, robots must operate safely and reliably in order to carry on the tasks they have been designed for.

In this talk I will present some of the methods that we developed to detect, track and identify people with mobile robots for real-world applications in the cleaning industry and the elderly care sector. These methods rely on one or multiple sensors including laser, depth and thermal cameras. I will also illustrate some of our work for monitoring and recognising human activities in indoor and outdoor applications. The presentation will include several examples from previous and current research projects in assistive, industrial and agricultural robotics.

Guest short bio:

Dr Nicola Bellotto is an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science, University of Lincoln, UK, and a member of the Lincoln Centre for Autonomous Systems. His main research interests are in machine perception, especially for human detection, tracking, identification and activity recognition with autonomous mobile robots. He has a Master in Electronic Engineering from the University of Padova, Italy, and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Essex, UK. Before joining the University of Lincoln, he was a researcher in the Active Vision Lab at the University of Oxford. Dr Bellotto is the recipient of a Google Faculty Research Award and a PI/Co-I in several funded projects on autonomous mobile robots.

Homepage: http://webpages.lincoln.ac.uk/nbellotto/