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Professor (“Hoogleraar”)
at K.U.Leuven
since October 2008.
(Assistant Professor since October 1998;
Associate Professor since October 2003; Junior Professor since October 1998.)
Coordinator of
EURON, the
European Robotics Research Network, as successor of the founding Coordinator
Henrik Christensen. Thanks
Henrik, for having created an internationally respected identity for
European robotics!
I have been re-elected for a second two-year term, on the EURON/EUROP Annual Meeting in San Sebastian, Spain, on March 11, 2010. I thank all EURON members for their confidence!
K.U.Leuven is
Member no. 11
of the network, since my colleague Hendrik van Brussel
made sure that K.U.Leuven was among the founding members.
I am also partner in the Coordination Action
euRobotics, whose main aim is to strive for a more intensive
collaboration between the academic EURON network and the industrial
European Robotics Platform EUROP.
Co-promotor of K.U.Leuven's GOA (“Concerted Research Action”)
project on
Global real-time optimal control of autonomous robots and mechatronic
systems (2009–2013), and its predecessors
Model based intelligent robot systems (2005–2009), and
Active Sensing for Intelligent Machines (1999–2004).
Partner in two
European
Integrated
Projects
of the European
Seventh
Framework Programme.
Both, BRICS
(Best practices in robotics) and
Rosetta
started in March 2009 and run for four years.
Academic research partner of the FMTC
(Flanders' Mechatronics Technology Centre).
Academic partner of the
OSADL (Open Source Automation
Development Lab).
Co-founder and Associate Editor of the
Journal of Software Engineering in Robotics (JOSER).
Member of the
Editorial Board of the
International Journal of Robotics Research.
Officer of the
International Foundation of Robotics Research
(2003–…).
Expert (and advocate since 1996) on Free and Open Source Software, and open IT standards. Advisor to various governmental, educational and industrial organisations and administrations.
My research focuses on the realtime aspects of algorithm and software design and implementation, close to the hardware, the controller(s) and the sensor(s), and making use of as much domain knowledge as possible. I am driven by the vision that only the skillful integration of modelling, perception, control and task specification will be able produce the advanced robotic systems of the future. My major research questions are:
How can Bayesian estimators be made more realtime, while still taking into account more common knowledge, more sensors, and more features in each sensor?
How should the robot control software of the future be developed? And how will it cope with the exploding complexity in knowledge, distributed components, and variation in tasks?
Design big, implement small, cooperate worldwide!
Here is a bit more detailed description of my research areas:
Robotic Skills for Intelligent Modelling, Perception and Control
I look into the combination of on-line,
recursive (Bayesian) estimation techniques to make (mobile) robot
manipulators adapt intelligently to their environment.
“Intelligently” to me means: according to the most appropriate
explicit sensing-action-environment model available to the
robot controller. Such controllers contain realtime
motion servoing based on the estimation results, as well as
event-based, task-driven switches between such realtime
estimation/servo control combinations.
Most of this research takes place in close cooperation with Joris De Schutter, Hendrik van Brussel and Jan Swevers.
Robot control software
I started the
Open RObot COntrol Software (OROCOS)
project in 2001, with later “spin-off” projects
Kinematics and Dynamics Library (KDL)
and
Bayesian Filtering Library (BFL).
Most of this research takes place in close cooperation with
FMTC (Flanders' Mechatronics
Technology Centre).
Currently, I am investigating how to get larger-scale FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) projects off the ground, around topics such as: the robotics and automation operating systems (by making the existing projects much more interoperable, and by more common developments); motion capture; Blender for Robotics (extensions to make the Blender 3D animation program more appropriate for use in robotics applications); Graphical Models (for use in robot kinematics and dynamics, as well as in intelligent knowledge systems in robotics).
Applied mechatronics and estimation projects, with various industrial and biomechanical partners in Belgium and Europe.
Contact me to get electronic copies of my publications. (This database-generated list only goes back five years.)
This page has a list of topics for Master theses, internships, or stages which I would very much like to supervise. I welcome Master students from universities as well as technical high schools. I'm especially interested in computer-literate students (Linux, C++, Java), who want to contribute to open source projects to make them better suited for robotics.
My personally most valued contribution to the education of our young engineers is my emphasis on (i) system-level design, and (ii) developing the attitude of critical evaluation of all available sources of information, starting with pseudo-peer reviewed open content such as the Wikipedia. Our students score poorly on both aspects, which I think are fundamental for Europe's ability to maintain an innovative R&D ecosystem. The future does not belong to those who posess the most knowledge, but to those who are able to understand how and where that knowledge could be applied.
The Robotics WEBook is a free robotics textbook initiative (originally initiated by Euron), and to which I have made a lot of contributions. (This project is not further maintained, and its content is being migrated towards an open content repository, such as, maybe, the Wikipedia.)
Born: 22 December 1962,
Turnhout, Belgium
Licentiate Mathematics (1984).
Burgerlijk Ingenieur Computerwetenschappen (1987). (Masters Degree in
Computer science)
Postgraduate Engineering Degree
Mechatronics (1988).
Military service (Aug. 1988-Jul. 1989).
1989-1995: Research Assistant at the
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven,
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Division
PMA.
PhD (1995), Kinematic Models for Robot Compliant Motion with
Identification of Uncertainties.
[abstract]
[A4
paper, gzipped PostScript]
[US
letter, gzipped PostScript]
1995–2003: Postdoctoral Fellow of the Fund for Scientific
Research-Flanders
(F.W.O.) in Belgium.
Mar. 1996–Aug. 1996: Postdoc at
GRASP Lab,
University of Pennsylvania,
Philadelphia, U.S.A., with
Vijay Kumar.
April–August 1999: sabatical with the
Robotics group
at Stanford University,
headed by Prof.
Oussama Khatib.
July–August 2002: visiting the
Centre for Autonomous Systems
at the
Royal Institute of Technology in
Stockholm, Sweden, headed by Prof.
Henrik Christensen.
I do not have a Skype account, nor am I part of social network sites such as Facebook or LinkedIn. And I am not planning to get those accounts, because of reasons of principles: these initiatives introduce proprietary protocols and/or prevent inter-community communication, and such things are known to create monopolies, and hence prevent fair markets of VOIP or social networking as emerging communication instruments. By the way, the same holds for related initiatives such as push email by RIM/Blackberry or other similar services. I am prepared to pay a price for fairness and freedom; I suggest to use the facilities offered by the free market of teleconferencing via the traditional telephone line and to use open VOIP protocols. It's only 30 years ago that our society succeeded to escape from under the traditional telecom monopolies, and it seems not to have learned anything from those experiences…
I am strongly convinced of the long-term advantages of using only Open Standards in all ICT matters: vendor independence, software independence, better chances of long-term archiving, stimulation of better decoupled ICT solutions, etc. So, please, send me only plain text, HTML, PDF, or ODF messages and documents in your electronic communication.
,
and
user.
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Copyleft 1997–2010, Herman Bruyninckx http://people.mech.kuleuven.be/~bruyninc Last update: 2 September 2010 Optimized for web standards. |
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