Two PhD positions with scholarships in the field of event-driven, asynchronous, neuromorphic sensors are available at the Robotics Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department of Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) in the Neuromorphic Systems and Interfaces group led by Dr. Chiara Bartolozzi.
Deadline: 21st September 2012
On-line application: http://servizionline.unige.it/studenti/post-laurea/dottorato
Research theme:
Carrying out real-world tasks in artificial behaving systems robustly and efficiently is one of the major challenges of today’s research in ICT. This is especially true if performances even remotely similar to those of biological behaving systems are desired. Indeed, biological systems are clearly outperforming artificial computing and robotic systems in terms of appropriateness of the behavioural response, robustness to interference and noise, adaptation to ever changing environmental conditions, or energy efficiency. All these properties are strongly interconnected and arise from the characteristics of the radically different style of computation used by the biological brain. In conventional robotics systems, sensory information is available in a sequence of “snapshots” taken at regular intervals. In this context high dynamics can be sensed only by increasing the sampling rate. Unfortunately the available bandwidth limits the amount of information that can be transmitted forcing a compromise between resolution and speed. As a result, current robotic systems are too slow and cannot react appropriately to unexpected, dynamical events. Biological systems also show us that predictive behaviour can compensate quite effectively for such latencies; however, proper predictions can be achieved only if scenes' dynamics are captured with sufficient temporal resolution. Neuromorphic sensors appear then as an efficient optimal solution to the problem. Neuromorphic event-based sensors sample information asynchronously with temporal resolutions that are order of magnitudes larger than the ones of conventional artificial cameras, while, at the same time, largely suppressing information redundancies and optimizing bandwidth usage and computational costs.
In this context two complementary research themes are available for PhD thesis:
Event-driven visual perception (theme 1.15)
N. of available positions: 1
The goal of the proposed research theme is the development of event-driven artificial vision for a humanoid robot, fully exploiting the advantages of such an un-conventional type of sensory encoding and validating it on a robotic platform capable of complex interaction with the real world. The research will start from the existing work on the development of event-driven motion estimation and object recognition and will involve the development of algorithms for spike-based vision, using both artificial and real data. This work will be complemented by the use and validation of the developed computational methods for driving the behaviour of the humanoids robot iCub (www.icub.org).
Event-driven tactile sensing (theme 1.16)
N. of available positions: 1
The goal of the proposed research theme is the study and development of artificial event-driven tactile sensors for a humanoid robot. It is a multi-disciplinary work that will combine the study of:
- biological sensory transduction,
- neuromorphic mixed signals microelectronics for the development of the sensor encoding
- diverse existing mechanisms and materials for tactile sensory transduction
with the goal of creating an optimal system for event-driven tactile sensors. The potential applications of this line of research will start from the use in a bio-inspired event-driven humanoid robot (the “neuromorphic” iCub), up to the use in artificial limbs for sensorized prosthetics.
For further details concerning the research project, please contact: chiara.bartolozzi@iit.it
The PhD scholarships are part of the post-graduate program of the University of Genova, school of “Life and Humanoid Technologies”, Doctoral Course on “Robotics, Cognition and Interaction Technologies”. http://www.iit.it/en/openings/phd-calls.html
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