Nowadays, robotics is widespread in multiple fields, from industrial processes of manufacturing machines and tools, to security and defense industry, and reaching the health industry. Robots replace difficult tasks of precision, repeatability and surveillance that humans are not able to achieve. The new generation of robots is capable of executing complex tasks of welding, lifting or assembling, and the injuries and toxic contamination risks on humans were noticeably diminished. Also, robotics became a useful tool for surgeons in realization of difficult tasks during medical procedures. However, in order to achieve the proper functioning of a robot, there are involved several steps: the phenomenological modeling and robot dynamics simulation, the inclusion, prediction and compensation of effects encountered in practice (e.g. nonlinearities such as frictions and vibrations), or the system identification which is a major requirement in increasing the speed and precision of the robots. Another important step in robotics is artificial intelligence, which needs to solve the problem of how to put the human intelligence into machines, so that they are able to handle tasks of object manipulation and navigation, as well as having a natural interaction and realize the tracking of users. Some of these robots will be presented during the seminar, starting with a presentation of micro-mechatronic systems used for the RFID tags manufacturing, then continuing with applications of industrial robots used in the automotive industry and not only. Also, the Hanson Android will be included in the presentation, which is a robot able to express a natural interaction and track users, and implemented to an unparalleled degree of realism for coordinated speech and lip motions.
Ioana-Corina Bogdan received her Ph.D. in Automation, Image and Signal Processing and Computer Engineering from Paul Verlaine University of Metz, France, in 2010. Since then, she was a Graduate Assistant and Researcher at the University of Texas at Arlington (2013-15), Invited Guest Professor at the National School of Engineering of Metz, France (2015), Assistant Teaching Professor at Northeastern University in Boston (2017-2020) and part time lecturer for the same university during 2021, Scientific Collaborator at Transilvania University of Brasov (Romania, 2016-2017, 2020-2021), and R&D engineer at Kawasaki Robotics in Detroit (2016-2017). Currently, she is a Scientific Collaborator at Transilvania University of Brasov.
Previously, Dr. Bogdan was involved in National Science Foundation (NSF) projects as team leader for the Soft Robotics Project and deputy leader for the Social Robotics Project. The Soft Robotics Project was an NSF funded project focusing on sensor development for robotic skin and robotic arms in order to improve the physical human-robot interaction. The Social Robotics Project involved a robot used for Autism Spectrum Disorder studies (Zeno Robot), and social robot interaction, the Phillip K. Dick Android. Her research work on social robots was awarded with the Dr. Kanako Miura Award of IEEE International Conference on Humanoid Robotics, Madrid, Spain in 2014. Also, she has extensive work on different scales of robots used in industry (industrial robots used in the automotive production lines of Ford and Toyota), medical field (pharmaceutical production lines with Delta robots and noninvasive surgery), as well as micro-robotics (Intellichip Project in collaboration with Meusonic SAS, France for RFID tags development and manufacturing).