各位团队成员， 大家好！
应林涛老师邀请，美国伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校(UIUC) Girish Chowdhary教授将于7月17日下午14:00为我院师生作学术报告。具体安排如下：
报告时间：2018年7月17日（周二）下午14:00开始
报告地点：紫金港校区，生工食品学院，D535
Title: Autonomous and Intelligent Robots in Unstructured Field Environments
Abstract: What if a team of collaborative autonomous robots grew your food for you? In this talk, I will demonstrate some key technological advances that are bringing this future a lot nearer! Equipment manufacturers have been automating large agricultural equipment – tractors, harvesters, and even excavators; but automating large equipment only addresses a part of the agricultural labor crisis. Large equipment cannot be used in wet, muddy, and uneven fields; it cannot be used when the crop canopy grows; and it is expensive. Furthermore, practices like blanket spraying, tilling, and the increasing size of equipment are leading to critical sustainability problems: Herbicide resistant weeds, soil compaction, increasing carbon footprints, and pesticide runoff are just a few of these problems.
The focus of this talk is on the new breed of lightweight, compact, and highly autonomous field robots that my group is creating and deploying in fields across the US: TerraSentia. I will show several videos of the TerraSentia robot, which is being widely hailed as opening the doors to an exciting revolution in agricultural robotics by popular media, including Chicago Tribune, the MIT Technology Review, Discovery Canada and leading technology blogs, as well has won several awards, including the best systems paper award at Robotics Science and Systems conference 2018. I will discuss three key enablers of this technology: 1. Low cost design through 3-D printing; 2. Autonomy using GPS and row-following behaviors with LIDAR sensors, and 3. New algorithms for robust and persistent autonomy in challenging field environments. Along with the technical details, my goal is to also discuss why agricultural robotics is a critical and game changing technology that will drive transformative advances in agriculture as well as robotics.
欢迎广大教师、研究生到时前来参加！
Girish Chowdhary is an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the director of the Distributed Autonomous Systems laboratory at UIUC. He holds a PhD (2010) from Georgia Institute of Technology in Aerospace Engineering. He was a postdoc at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2011-2013), and an assistant professor at Oklahoma State University’s Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department (2013-2016). He also worked with the German Aerospace Center's (DLR's) Institute of Flight Systems for around three years (2003-2006). Girish's ongoing research interest is in theoretical insights and practical algorithms for adaptive autonomy, with a particular focus on field-robotics. He has authored over 90 peer reviewed publications in various areas of adaptive control, robotics, and autonomy. On the practical side, Girish has led the development and flight-testing of over 10 research UAS platform. UAS autopilots based on Girish’s work have been designed and flight-tested on six UASs, including by independent international institutions. Girish is an investigator on NSF, AFOSR, NASA, ARPA-E, and DOE grants. He is the winner of the Air Force Young Investigator Award, and the Aerospace Guidance and Controls Systems Committee Dave Ward Memorial award. He is the co-founder of EarthSense Inc., working to make ultralight agricultural robotics a reality.