Autonomous excavators are an essential part of the goal of “building the robots that build the world”. One unique problem in autonomous excavation is how to deal with the granular materials like soils and sands, which is seldom studied in robotics. In this talk, Dr. Pan will present his team’s recent work about how to achieve efficient manipulation of soils by optimizing the trajectory of the excavator’s bucket, and how to enable the excavator to be aware of the objects buried in the soils by using a proximity sensing mechanism based on jamming in granular materials.
Dr. Jia Pan is currently an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Hong Kong. He received his BEng in Control Engineering from Tsinghua University, MEng in Pattern Recognition from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests are robotic control and learning with a special focus on the development of autonomous robotic systems for navigation and manipulation.
Clean water and clean air are vital for public health. This project focuses on developing high-efficiency and environmentally sustainable filters for removing harmful air/water pollutants. The team has developed novel architectures and functionalities for the filters to achieve high permeance, high removal efficiency, and excellent reusability.
