Seminar Abstract: Attaining animal-like locomotion and manipulation in uncertain environments is a largely open problem. New advancements in mechatronics have enabled robots with limbs to complete some impressive complex tasks, especially in structured environments. Moving in more complex settings, where reliable contacts with unstructured and uncertain environment surfaces are necessary, new perception and planning algorithms are required. This talk will focus on some of our latest results for locomotion and manipulation, that were applied on several real-world robots, including animaloids and humanoids.

Speaker Bio: Dimitrios Kanoulas is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and associate professor in robotics and computation at the University College London (UCL), Department of Computer Science, working in the field of perception and learning for robots that have limbs, including quadrupeds, humanoids, and mobile manipulators. Between 2014-2019, he was a senior postdoctoral researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), working with Professors Nikos Tsagarakis and Darwin Caldwell on several EU projects. In August 2014, he completed his Ph.D. at Northeastern University, advised by Professor Marsette Vona on perception for bipedal locomotion. He started out as a member of the Algorithms and Theory group at Northeastern University. During the summer of 2012, he completed an internship at INRIA in France, advised by Drs. Christian Laugier and Alexandros Makris. He received a diploma in the Computer Engineering and Informatics Department from University of Patras, Greece in 2008, advised by Prof Paul Spirakis and Dr. Charalampos Tsaknakis.