SOCIETY NEWS
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higeo Hirose, IEEE Fellow, has been named the recipient of the 2014 IEEE Robotics and Automation Award for his con-tributions to the design and construc-tion of multiple nonconvenconstruc-tional robotic systems, such as snakelike, quadruped walking, wall climbing, and swarm robots.Hirose succeeded in dem-onstrating the smooth undu-lating motion of a 2-m-long snakelike robot ACM-III in 1972 for the first time. He received his Ph.D. degree for the biomechanical study of snakes and snakelike robots in 1976. At the Tokyo
Insti-tute of Technology, he held the following academic positions: assistant professor from 1976 to 1979, associate professor from 1979 to 1992, professor from 1992
to 2011, and distinguished professor from 2011 to 2013.
Hirose published the book Biologically Inspired Robots (Oxford University Press) in 1993. In that publication, he coined the unique research field of biologically inspired robotics.
Hirose has always been interested in the creative design of robotic mecha-nisms and their control systems. He developed more than 150 robots,
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2014.2299503 Date of publication: 10 March 2014
RAS Leadership
2014–2015 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Executive Committee.
Raja Chatila, president, ISIR—Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique, Université Pierre et Marie CurieParis, France
Satoshi Tadokoro, president–elect and vice president of Technical Activities, Tohoku University Graduate School of Information Sciences, Sendai, Miyagi, Japan
Paul Oh, secretary, Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
Ronald Lumia, treasurer, University of New Mexico,
Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States
Anthony Maciejewski, vice president of Financial Activities, Colorado State University Electrical and Computer Engineering, Fort Collins, Colorado, United States
Jing Xiao, vice president of Member Activities, University of North Carolina, Charlotte, United States
Antonio Bicchi, vice president of Publication Activities, University of Pisa Interdepartmental Research Center, “E. Piaggio” Pisa, Italy
Oussama Khatib, vice president, of Conference Activities, Stanford University Stanford, California, United States
Raj Madhavan, vice president of Industrial Activities, Institute for Systems Research
UMD-CP and Intelligent Systems Division, NIST, Clarksburg, Maryland, United States Shigeo Hirose.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2014.2301252 Date of publication: 10 March 2014
including snakelike mobile robots, articulated robot arms, quadruped walking robots, and wheeled and crawler mobile robots. The main objec-tives of his research were to realize robots for search and rescue opera-tions, humanitarian demining, medical and welfare purposes, and rovers for planetary exploration.
Hirose has received more than 50 aca-demic awards, including the Joseph Engelberger Robotics Award from the Robotic Industries Association (2009), the Medal with Purple Ribbon from the Japanese Government (2006), the Award of Merits from IFToMM (2004), and the first Pioneer in Robotics and Automation Award (1999) from the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS).
Hirose is currently the CTO of HiBot Corporation (founded by his former students at the Hirose Robotic Labora-tory), a professor emeritus of the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and a visiting professor at Ritsumeikan University.
Hirose will receive this most presti-gious IEEE-level award at ICRA 2014 in Hong Kong.
RAS Members Elevated to Fellow Grade
RAS congratulates its members who were elevated to Fellow grade in 2014.
The IEEE grade of Fellow is conferred by the Board of Directors upon a per-son with an extraordinary record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest.
The following are the 2014 RAS Fel-lows evaluated by RAS:
● Martin Buss for contributions to hap-tic telepresence systems and autono-mous robots
● James Colgate for contributions to the field of haptics
● Liyi Dai for leadership and contribu-tions to discrete event systems and singular systems
● Daniel Lee for contributions to machine learning algorithms for per-ception and motor control
● Stefan Schaal for contributions to robot learning and modular motion planning
● Metin Sitti for contributions to micro- and nanoscale robotic systems ● Hong Zhang for contributions to
col-lective robotics and intelligent sens-ing in oil sand minsens-ing.
2014 RAS Fellows Evaluated by Other IEEE Societies
● Rene Vidal: Evaluated by the IEEE Computer Society for contributions to subspace clustering and motion segmentation in computer vision
● Robert Kozma: Evaluated by the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society for contributions to pattern-based computation pattern-based on large-scale networks and random graphs ● Kazuo Tanaka: Evaluated by the
IEEE Computational Intelligence Society for contributions to fuzzy control system design and analysis ● Ali Jadbabaie: Evaluated by the IEEE
Control Systems Society for contri-butions to the theory of multiagent coordination and control
● Hermano Krebs: Evaluated by the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society for contributions to rehabilitation robotics and the under-standing of neurorehabilitation.
RAS Around the World
RAS Technical Education Program (Summer School)
From 19–27 October 2013, the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) in Florianopolis, Brazil, hosted the Fourth International Summer School on Screw-Theory-Based Methods in Robotics (Figure 1). Summer Screws, which is the informal name for the summer school (although Spring Screws may have been more appropriate for this southern hemisphere edition), has been organized
AdCom Election Results
The newly elected members of the RAS Administrative Committee (AdCom) began their role on 1 January 2014. They will join those serving current positions on the AdCom for their first meeting during the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Hong Kong, China.
Toshio Fukuda, Meijo University, Japan
Seth Hutchinson, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Urbana, Illinois, United States
Dong-Soo Kwon, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, South Korea
Bradley Nelson, ETH Zurich, Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems, Zurich, Switzerland
Hong Qiao, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Science Beijing, China Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Science Beijing, China
Hong Zhang, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
by the PMAR Laboratory of Design and Measurement for Automation and Robotics at the University of Genoa, Italy, regularly since 2009: twice in Genoa, Italy, and once in Shanghai, China. With crucial financial support from RAS through the Technical Educa-tion Program (TEP), and with the hard work of the local organizers from the
Robotics Laboratory LAR at UFSC, in 2013, this TEP was able to be held in South America.
The 34 participants, who were mostly from Brazil and its neighboring countries, joined the five instructors to learn about screw theory, its mathemat-ical basics, and its robotics applications. As in previous years, the school began with a short lecture on the history of the subject by Harvey Lipkin. After being introduced to the vector-space properties of twists and wrenches (Dimiter Zlatanov) on the first full day, the attendees explored screw-theory-inspired methods for parallel-mecha-nism synthesis (Xianwen Kong), velocity analysis (Dimiter Zlatanov), elasticity modeling (Harvey Lipkin), and dynamics algorithms (Roy Feath-erstone). Jon Selig concluded by relat-ing all of this to Lie groups and Lie algebras. It has become a Summer Screws tradition to include local invited
lecturers. Daniel Martins and Henrique Simas talked about related research at LAR (Figure 2).
This made for six grueling days of lectures, examples, exercises, discus-sions, and, to top it all, an exam at the end. However, there is always a relief, this time Santa Catarina’s gorgeous beaches, beautiful lagoon (Figure 3), and many good restaurants serving delicious Brazilian food. Nevertheless, it never ceases to amaze how many enthusiastic victims the practical effec-tiveness and mathematical beauty of screw theory can attract. More than ever before, this year’s attendees seemed stimulated, engaged, and eager to learn. However, the best Summer Screws is always the one to come, so if you missed the one in 2013, you are welcome to join us in September for the 2014 edition hosted at the Univer-sity of Bologna, Italy, by Marco Carri-cato, Vincenzo Parenti-Castelli, and their team of volunteers.
Distinguished Lecturers
The RAS Tunisia Chapter was pleased to host Prof. Klaus Schilling from the University of Wuerzburg, Germany, as an RAS Distinguished Lecturer from 29 May to 1 June 2013 in El Mouradi Pal-ace Hotel, Sousse, Tunisia.
The first lecture presented by Schil-ling was “Telematics in Networked Robotic Vehicle Systems for an Effi-cient Flow of Traffic and of Materials” on 30 May 2013. That afternoon, the RAS Tunisia Chapter coorganized with the IEEE Industry Applications Society (IAS) Tunisia Chapter an impressive industry visit to the inter-national company LEONI Wiring Sys-tems located in Sousse (Figure 4). LEONI is a global supplier of wires, optical fibers, cables, and cable sys-tems as well as related development services for applications in the auto-motive business and other industries.
The second lecture was “Pico-Satel-lites for Education and Research in Networked Space Systems.” More than 70 students and faculty across various disciplines attended the lecture, which stimulated intensive technical discus-sions afterward. At the end of the talk,
Figure 1. The organizers, lecturers, and participants of the Fourth International Summer School on Screw-Theory-Based Methods in Robotics (Summer Screws) in front of the UFSC Department of Mechanical Engineering building.
Figure 2. From left, Dimiter Zlatanov, Brazilian student Henrique Prado, and lecturers Harvey Lipkin and Jon Selig discussing the material at the end of a long school day.
a special award and certificate of appreciation was offered to Schilling to thank him for his efforts (Figure 5). During the talks, an IEEE booth was organized to share the benefits of RAS membership and encourage partici-pants to join the Society.
A full-day seminar “Unmanned Ground Vehicles,” was held on 2 December 2013 at Hashemite Univer-sity, Jordan, and given by Dr. Roland Lenain, a research fellow from the National Research Institute of Science and Technology for Environment and Agriculture (IRSTEA), France.
This event provided an overview of the mobile robot automation problem in different configurations and with different levels of interaction with ter-rain. In the first session, the basics of perception and control for a classical-car-like mobile robot were proposed, showing the current work on those topics and dif ferent kinds of
applications. The second session was devoted to the coordination between several robots, raising the problem of formation control, communication, and safety. In the third session, some challenging problems were pointed out in the field of motion in harsh condi-tions. Some advances about high dynamics were also highlighted, show-ing the interest of considershow-ing not only motion accuracy but also the integrity
warranty (with respect to stability and obstacle avoidance).
The seminar was organized by the RAS Jordan Chapter in collaboration with the IEEE Student Branch and the Department of Mechatronics Engineer-ing at Hashemite University. More than 70 students, faculty members, profes-sionals, and researchers attended the seminar and participated in this event. The attendees were from Hashemite University and other Jordanian Univer-sities. Some others were from the King Abdullah II for Design and Develop-ment Bureau (KADDB) (Figure 6).
Chapters in Action
Minesweepers
The detection and removal of antiper-sonnel landmines and unexploded ord-nances (UXOs) is currently a serious problem of political, economical, envi-ronmental, and humanitarian dimen-sion. In response, the RAS Egypt Chapter organized “Minesweepers: Toward a Landmine-Free World” in November 2013 as the first interna-tional outdoor robotics competition focused on humanitarian demining. The competition aims to raise public awareness of the seriousness of land-mines and UXOs and the role of sci-ence and technology in solving this problem. The competition provides motivation professors, engineers, for and students working on innovative robotic solutions for this serious prob-lem (Figure 7).
Figure 4. The participants of the industry visit to LEONI.
Figure 5. Mohammad Salah presents the certificate of appreciation to Prof. Klaus Schilling.
The winning teams were EMAR (individuals), Minebusters (German versity in Cairo), The Rabbite (Misr Uni-versity for Science and Technology), Mine Dragon (Creatokids), and Kids Finder Robot (IDEL School). The win-ners received monetary prizes of US$1,000, US$750, US$400, US$300, and US$200 from the German University in Cairo and certificates of honor from the RAS Egypt. For more information,
please visit the RAS Egypt Web site: http://www.ras-egypt.org/.
Italian Chapter Young Author Best Paper Award
The RAS Italian Chapter each year awards the Young Author Best Paper Award for papers appearing in RAS-sponsored publications in the previous two years coauthored by a young author from the Chapter.
In 2013, the award was in its fifth edi-tion. The committee, composed of Gianluca Antonelli (chair), Benedetto Allotta, Cecilia Laschi, Giuseppe Oriolo, and Luigi Villani, awarded Francesco Basile (Figure 8) for the article: F. Basile, P. Chiacchio, and J. Coppola, “A Hybrid Model of Complex Automated Ware-house Systems—Part I: Modeling and Simulation,” IEEE Trans. Autom. Sci. Eng., vol. 9, no. 4, pp. 640–653, 2012.
RoboBusiness
The Santa Clara Valley Chapter repre-sented RAS at RoboBusiness held in
Santa Clara, California, in October 2013. The Chapter gave RAS visibility to the attendees, which included indus-try robotics contacts and executives (Figure 9).
New Chapters
RAS welcomes the following new Stu-dent Branch Chapters:
● Buffalo University at SUNY/AB, Buf-falo, New York
● Chengannur College of Engineering, Alleppey, Kerala, India
● Cochin University of Science and Technology, Kochi, Kerala, India ● Fundacao Universidade Federal do
ABC, Sao Paulo, Brazil
● Instituto de Ingenieros de Morelos, Cuernavaca, Mor, Mexico
● Rowan University, Pitman, New Jersey
● Superior Tecnico Student Branch Chapter, Portugal
● THDC Institute of Hydropower Engineering and Technology St, Uttarakhand, India
● Universidad Catolica Santo Toribio de Mogrovejo, Chiclayo, Peru ● Universidad Nacional Federico
Vil-larreal, Lima, Peru.
For more information, please visit the RAS Chapters Web site: www.ieee-ras.org.
RAS Members in the News
RAS member and Past President Bruno Siciliano is the project coordinator for the European Commission’s European Robotics Challenges project beginning in January 2014. The project proposes to launch three industry-relevant chal-lenges aimed at sharpening the focus of European manufacturing through a number of application experiments, while adopting an innovative approach that ensures benchmarking and perfor-mance evaluation. The three challenges concern the following scenarios: recon-figurable interactive manufacturing cell, shop floor logistics and manipula-tion, and plant servicing and inspec-tion. The calls for challengers and end users will open on 1 April 2014. For more information, please visit the European Robotics Challenges Web site: www.robotics-challenges.eu.
Figure 7. The participants of the Minesweepers competition hosted by the RAS Egypt Chapter.
Figure 8. Gianluca Antonelli (right), chair of the RAS Italian Chapter, presents the Young Author Best Paper Award to Francesco Basile, coauthor of the article, during the Italian Chapter annual dinner in Palermo, Italy, in September 2013.
