EAISI lecture by visiting professor Lorenzo Natale

TITLE

Interactive object learning and perception with vision and touch

ABSTRACT

Modern AI algorithms provide exceptional performance, but require long training time and large, annotated, datasets. This hampers their application in those settings, such as robotics, in which data is scarce. On the other hand, robots can actively interact with the environment to acquire new knowledge. To extract structured information, however, they need to be endowed with appropriate sensors, and exploratory behavior that guide the interaction with the world. In this talk I will present various studies in which we have investigated the use of visual and tactile information to explore, perceive and grab objects. I will also present recent work in which we have developed fast learning algorithms that allow robots to learn about objects from interaction.

BIOGRAPHY

Lorenzo Natale is Tenured Senior Researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology and coordinator of the Center for Robotics and Intelligent Systems. He received his degree in Electronic Engineering (with honors) and Ph.D. in Robotics from the University of Genoa. He was later postdoctoral researcher at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He was invited professor at the University of Genova where he taught the courses of Natural and Artificial Systems and Antropomorphic Robotics for students of the Bioengineering curriculum. In 2020 and 2021 he was visiting Professor at the University of Manchester.

Lorenzo Natale has contributed to the development of various humanoid platforms. He was one of the main contributors to the design and development of the iCub platform and he has been leading the development of the iCub software architecture and the YARP middleware. His research interests range from vision and tactile sensing to software architectures for robotics.

He has been principal investigator and co-principal investigator in several EU funded projects (FP7, H2020 and Horizon Europe), and he is currently coordinator of the Horizon Europe project CONVINCE. He was general chair of IEEE ARSO 2018 and served as Program Chair of ICDL-Epirob 2014 and HAI 2017 and associate editor for IEEE-Transactions on Robotics and IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. He is Specialty Chief Editor for the Humanoid Robotics Section of Frontiers in Robotics and AI. He is Ellis Fellow and Core Faculty of the Ellis Genoa Unit.