Conferencia sobre Robots y Cambio Climático

El próximo Martes, día 10 de Noviembre, a las 17 horas, se celebrará la conferencia en el Salón de Grados de la ETSI, Camino de los Descubrimientos s/n,  que impartirá la profesora Ayanna Howard del Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia, USA) con el título:

«Robots and Climate Change: Using a Science Network of Mobility Operators that Explore in Snow (SnoMotes)»

Más abajo pueden leerse Resumen de Conferencia y Bio de Ayanna Howard.

Abstract
Recently, it has been discovered that the giant ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica have been shrinking at an accelerated rate. While it is believed that these regions hold important information related to global climate change, there is still insufficient data to be able to accurately predict the glacial behavior and the subsequent global ramiffications. Satellites have been able to map the ice sheet elevations with increasing accuracy, but data about general weather conditions (i.e. wind speed, barometric pressure, etc.) must be measured at the surface. In order to obtain a denser set of measurements, human expeditions could be sent to these remote and dangerous areas. Alternatively, a group of autonomous robotic rovers could be deployed to these same locations, mitigating the cost, effort, and danger of human presence. For this to be a viable solution though, methodologies must be developed for deployment of this surface-based mobile science network in these arctic environments. Speciffic technological achievements that must be achieved include designing a robust Arctic rover
platform, methods for navigating arctic terrain, and developing schemes to deploy multiple robotic  Scientific explorers to speciffic science sites of interest. In this talk, we discuss an infrastructure that
addresses these issues in order to enable successful deployment of these robotic scientiffic explorers.
Bio: Dr. Ayanna Howard received her B.S. in Electrical Engineering  from Brown University, her M.S.E.E. from the University of Southern  California, and her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University  of Southern California, Los Angeles in 1999. Her area of research is  centered around the concept of humanized intelligence, the process of
embedding human cognitive capability into the control path of autonomous  systems. This work, which addresses issues of autonomous control  as well as aspects of interaction with humans and the surrounding  environment, has resulted in over 60 written works in a number of  projects – from autonomous rover navigation for planetary surface  exploration to intelligent terrain assessment algorithms for landing  on Mars. To date, her unique accomplishments have been documented  in over 12 featured articles – including being named as one of the  world’s top young
innovators of 2003 by the prestigious MIT  Technology Review journal and in TIME magazine’s «Rise of the  Machines» article in 2004.

From 1993-2005, Dr. Howard was at NASA’s Jet Propulsion  Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, where she led  research efforts on various robotic projects utilizing vision, fuzzy  logic, and neural network methodologies. Following this, she  joined the Systems and Controls Group at Georgia Tech in 2005  and founded the Human-Automation Systems (HumAnS) Laboratory.