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/
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
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