Current Robotics Reports - Meet the Editors
François Michaud
Editor-in-Chief
François Michaud, PhD, is an engineer and professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Université de Sherbrooke. Holder of the Canada Research Chair in Mobile Robotics and Intelligent Autonomous Systems from 2001 to 2011, his research activities are aimed at integrating intelligent autonomous robotic systems into everyday operating conditions, to improve the well-being of people. His expertise is in autonomous decision-making algorithms, human-robot interaction, user-interfaces, artificial vision, and audition. He has extensive experience in initiating and conducting interdisciplinary research projects involving collaborators in physiotherapy, occupational therapy, child psychiatry, education, cognitive science, arts, automotive, and manufacturing. He has published over 190 peer-reviewed papers in journals and international conferences, has been awarded 8 patents, has five significant distributed open source (software and hardware) contributions used by the robotics community, and has received funding over 48 M$ supporting a broad range of research initiatives. He is the founding director of the Interdisciplinary Institute for Technological Innovation (3IT) (2008-2015), Quebec Strategic Cluster INTER (Interactive Technologies in Rehabilitation Engineering) (2011-), and a graduate training program in Collaborative Robotics for the Manufacturing Sector. He is currently Director of the Bachelor of Robotics Engineering Program at the Université de Sherbrooke (the first and only one in Canada).
John Billingsley
Section Editor: Agriculture Robotics
As a Cambridge Mathematics Scholar, John completed the Mathematics Tripos in two years, then spent his third year studying electronics. Following a Graduate Apprenticeship, he designed algorithms and electronics for aircraft control systems. He then returned to Cambridge to complete his doctoral research on Predictive Control. He remained in Cambridge as a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College. Eight years later he moved to a Readership at Portsmouth Polytechnic, now Portsmouth University and later became Professor of Robotics. He led groups researching the ‘Craftsman Robot’ and walking robots. He helped found companies designing embedded electronics for domestic appliances and nuclear test equipment. In 1992 John moved to Toowoomba, Australia, where he applied machine vision to precision tractor guidance. He co-founded the National Centre for Engineering in Agriculture of the University of Southern Queensland. This year he was joint organiser of the twenty-sixth annual conference on Mechatronics and Machine Vision in Practice, a series which he inaugurated in 1994.
Silvia Ferrari
Section Editor: Defense, Military, and Surveillance Robotics
Silvia Ferrari is John Brancaccio Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University. Prior to that, she was Professor of Engineering and Computer Science at Duke University, and Founder and Director of the NSF Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) and Fellowship program on Wireless Intelligent Sensor Networks (WISeNet). Currently, she is the Director of the Laboratory for Intelligent Systems and Controls (LISC) at Cornell University, and her principal research interests include robust adaptive control of aircraft, learning and approximate dynamic programming, and optimal control of mobile sensor networks. She received the B.S. degree from Embry–Riddle Aeronautical University and the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University. She is a senior member of the IEEE, and a member of ASME, SPIE, and AIAA. She is the recipient of the ONR young investigator award (2004), the NSF CAREER award (2005), and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) award (2006).
Maria Gini
Section Editor: Group Robotics
Maria Gini is a faculty in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota, where she is a Distinguished Professor of the College of Science and Engineering. She works on decision making for autonomous agents in many application domains, ranging from swarm robotics to distributed methods for allocation of tasks to robots, to methods for robots to explore an unknown environment, teamwork for search and rescue, and navigation in dense crowds. She is a Fellow of the ACM, of the IEEE, and of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). She has published more than 60 journal articles and more than 300 conference papers and book chapters. She is Editor-in-Chief of Robotics and Autonomous Systems, and is on the editorial board of numerous journals, including Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, and Integrated Computer-Aided Engineering.
Norberto Pires
Section Editor: Robotics in Manufacturing
Norberto Pires has a degree in Physics Engineering, a branch of Instrumentation (1991), a M.Sc. degree in Instrumentation (1994), and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering (1999). He did post-doc work in Automatic Control (1999-2000, Lund, Sweden) and was in several universities as a guest scientist. He is the author of several hundred scientific and technical papers published in prestigious journals and conferences, 3 books in English edited by Springer-Nature (a 4th book is being published in additive-manufacturing, also with Springer-Nature), 3 books in Portuguese (with several editions, several chapters in books), and more than 500 technical articles – and scientific director of the Portuguese Robotica Journal. He was the President of the Portuguese Robotics Society, of the Portuguese Association for Automatic Control, of the Regional Coordination and Development Committee of the Center Region of Portugal, of the Investment Committee JESSICA Holding Fund Portugal, a member of the National Council of Science and Technology and of the National Council of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, among other positions. In mid-2007 he was elected CEO of iParque, a Science and Technology Park of Coimbra, where he oversaw a small but very dedicated team to plan, finance, and build the business park. He is currently Associate Professor with “Agregação” of the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the University of Coimbra.
Adriana Tapus
Section Editor: Service and Interactive Robotics
Adriana Tapus is Full Professor in the Autonomous Systems and Robotics Lab in the Computer Science and System Engineering Department (U2IS), at ENSTA Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, France. She received her PhD in Computer Science from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) in 2005. She worked as an Associate Researcher at the University of Southern California (USC), where she was among the pioneers on the development of socially assistive robotics, also participating to activity in machine learning, human sensing, and human-robot interaction. Her main interests are on long-term learning (i.e. in particular in interaction with humans), human modeling, and on-line robot behavior adaptation to external environmental factors. Prof. Tapus is an Associate Editor for several robotics journals (IJSR, ACM THRI, and IEEE TCDS) and on the steering committee of several major robotics conferences (General Chair 2020 of RO-MAN, General Chair 2019 of HRI, Program Chair 2018 of HRI). She has more than 150 research publications and she received the Romanian Academy Award for her contributions in assistive robotics in 2010. She was elected in 2016 as one of the 25 women in robotics you need to know about.
Pingping Zhu
Section Editor: Defense, Military, and Surveillance Robotics
Pingping Zhu is currently a Research Associate with the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA. Prior to that, he was a Postdoctoral Associate with the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Material Science, Duke University. His research interests include approximate dynamic programming (ADP), reinforcement learning (RL), optimal control of mobile sensor networks, finite random set statistics (FISST), signal processing, information theoretical learning (ITL), machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and neural networks. He received the B.S. degree in electronics and information engineering and M.S. degree from the Institute for Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China, in 2006 and 2008, respectively, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA, in 2010 and 2013, respectively.
https://sites.google.com/site/pingpingzhufl/ (this opens in a new tab)