ARAS Public Webinars

ARAS is intended to promote knowledge to a broad and interested audience. For this reason, a monthly public webinar is organized, in which, the research findings of different research teams will be presented with a general overview, to be useful for the public.

Invited By CeRVIM, Laval University

Parallel and Cable Robotics Research: Theoretical and Technological Advancements

Prof. Hamid D. Taghirad

Abstract:

Cable and parallel robotics have been gaining more attention among researchers due to their unique characteristics and applications. Simple structure, high payload capacity, agile movements, and deployable structures are the main characteristics that nominate cable-robots from the other types of manipulators for many applications such as imaging, cranes, agriculture, etc. Interdisciplinary research fields such as dynamic analysis and control synthesis of parallel and cable-driven manipulators by using modern and intelligent approaches will be given further consideration in this presentation.

Kamalolmol® robot is a representative of cable-driven robots developed in ARAS research group, which is a fast deployable edutainment cable-driven robot for calligraphy and painting (chiaroscuro) applications. Additionally, ARAS research exploits the simplicity of cable robots with graph-based optimization and perception algorithms to create commercial inspection and imaging tools for various applications. In this webinar, the underlying concepts of such systems and the current state-of-the-art development of these advancements will be presented.

Date: Tuesday, March 8, 2022 (17 Esfand 1400)
Time: 20:30-21:30 (Iran Standard Time: +3:30 GMT)
12:00-13:00 (Eastern Standard Time: -5:00 GMT)

CeRVIM Link | Teaser | Poster

ARAS Current and Future Research: Developed Products and Algorithms

Prof. Hamid D. Taghirad

Webinar Video

Abstract:

ARAS Research group originated in 1997 and is proud of its 24+ years of brilliant background, and its contributions to the advancement of academic education and research in the field of dynamical system analysis and control in the robotics application. ARAS current research themes includes parallel and cable robotics, surgical robotics and autonomous robotics. Many products and algorithms are developed in these research group. In this presentation, an overview on these research topics is given, and the developed products and algorithms are briefly introduced.

Date: Monday, Oct. 11, 2021 (19 Mehr 1400)

Time:17:30-19:00 (+5:30 GMT Tehran local time) 10:30-12:00 (-4:00 GMT Canada Eastern Time Zone)

Webinar Details | Video

Cable-Driven Parallel Robots: Control Challenges and Solutions

Mohammad A. Khosravi

Assistant Professor, Amirkabir University of Technology

Webinar Teaser

Abstract:

In recent decades, the growing need of the industry for high-speed robots with a large workspace has led to the development of cable-driven parallel robots (CDPR). Having significantly lower inertia than the rigid linkage robots makes CDPRs a unique alternative for applications with large workspace requirements and high-speed manipulation demands. However, by cables, we may exert only tensile force in the pulling direction. The positive tensile force of the cables in CDPRs is guaranteed either through a passive force, such as gravity, or using redundant cables in their structure. This challenge motivates the researchers to develop desirable control algorithms for a CDPR to maintain positive tension in all the cables while having a suitable tracking performance. This talk addresses the control challenges in CDPRs and discusses some approaches that suitably employed for this class of robots. In particular, the first part of the talk demonstrates the CDPRs kinematics and their different types of the workspace as well as their dynamics. The second part of the talk focuses on the control challenges of the CDPRs and next, some solutions are introduced. In the end, the ongoing and future direction in the control of the CDPRs will be discussed.

Date: Monday, July 4, 2021 (4 Mordad 1400),

Time: 18:00-19:30 (+4:30 GMT Tehran local time) ,9:30-11:30 (-4:00 GMT Canada Eastern Time Zone)

Webinar Details | Video

Safe Reinforcement Learning (SRL) Using Control Barrier Functions

Zahra Marvi

Webinar Teaser

Abstract: This talk presents a method to learn barrier-certified safe controllers for safety-critical systems while providing an optimal performance with the focus on reinforcement learning approach. The problem describes designing optimal controllers for systems with unknown dynamics through the interaction while safety specifications of the system such as state constraints must be satisfied. We first start by reviewing the basics of reinforcement learning in control such as the overall framework, Bellman equation, actor/critic approximations and sequential improvement of controller by means of reducing the prediction error. Then, different types of control barrier functions and their application for restricting the states of the system within a desired safe region and therefore safety guarantee are discussed. The safe reinforcement learning problem is then formulated by means of control barrier functions to have a safe performance. Safety, stability and optimality of the proposed method are discussed and finally the off-policy reinforcement learning algorithm to implement the proposed method is presented.

Date & Time: Monday, May 31, 2021 (10 Khordad 1400) | 18:00-19:30 (+4:30 GMT Tehran local time), 9:30-11:30 (-4:00 GMT Canada Eastern Time Zone)

Webinar Details | Video

Artificial Intelligence and Haptic Technology in Intraocular Surgery Training (IFEES)

Prof. Hamid D. Taghirad

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Date & Time: April 21, 2021 | 17:30 (+4:30 GMT Tehran local time) | 9:30 (-4:00 GMT Canada Eastern Time Zone)

Registration | Webinar Details | Read More| video

Safe and Resilient Autonomous Navigation in Highly Dynamic Environments

Dr. Golnaz Habibi, Ph.D.

Research Scientist, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, MIT

Abstract: Despite all recent advances in robotics and automation, building a resilient, safe, and practical autonomous system with the ability of interacting with the environment efficiently and overcoming the challenges of real-world scenarios is not trivial. This talk addresses three critical challenges in building a fully autonomous system including safety, transfer-ability, and intractability. In particular, the first part of the talk focuses on challenges of self-driving vehicles navigating in highly dynamic environments. A transferable and scalable algorithm is introduced which incorporates the environment context for predicting the motion behaviors of pedestrians in environments with high level of uncertainty. The presented framework is also able to continually learn when the data is available incrementally, leading to a real-time learning and inference paradigm. Furthermore, the extension of the context-based perception pipeline to multi-agent learning such as fleet of autonomous vehicles (AV) or smart nodes (IX) will be described. The second part of the talk demonstrates an example of an end-to-end distributed and scalable pipeline for collective transport of an unknown object by a team of robots with limited sensing. At the end, ongoing and future direction in safety and robustness of visual autonomous navigation systems will be discussed.

Date & Time: Monday, April. 19, 2021 | 18:00-19:30 (+4:30 GMT Tehran local time) | 9:30-11:30 (-4:00 GMT Canada Eastern Time Zone)

Event Page | Poster | Teaser | Video |

10th Translational Ophthalmology Research Center Seminar

Hamid D. Taghirad

Parisa Abdi

Elham Ashrafi

Seyed Farzad Mohammadi

Mohammad Motaharifar

Hamid Riazi Esfahani

Alireza Norouzzadeh

Intraocular surgery is a hot topic of research among researchers, who are looking into novel areas in which haptic systems and assistive technologies would be beneficial. Since the human eye is a highly delicate organ with minuscule anatomic structures, the ocular surgeries are needed to be performed under extra precision and higher manipulation capabilities in contrast to other surgeries. In fact, any minute surgeon miss-manipulation, which might be negligible in the majority of other surgical operations, might lead to disastrous complications and even blindness for the patient in the ocular surgeries. This fact underlines the importance of assistive technologies in eye surgical procedures. The assistive technologies aim at giving extra manipulation to the surgeon during the operation or help the novice surgeons to obtain the required skills before performing actual operations at the surgical room. This presentation reviews novel recent breakthroughs along with new areas in which haptic systems and assistive technologies might provide a viable solution to overcome current challenges. Furthermore, ARAS Haptic system developed for eye surgery training will be introduced as a novel system used in intraocular surgeries.

Date & Time: Friday, December 11th, 2020 | 15:00-21:00 (Tehran Local Time) |

Webinar Video | Webinar Video Download | Webinar Poster | Webinar Program

ARAS Research on Swarm Robotics in Oil Spill Monitoring and Cleanup

Oil spills are serious threats to the marine environment in the era of increasing environmental concern. Effective efforts have been made to tackle this problem, amongst them, the concept of using swarm robotics for Oil Spill Monitoring and Cleanup is a promising solution. Thanks to the recent progress in robotics, there are opportunities to use autonomous arial drones for labor-intensive environment monitoring purposes. Engaging multiple drones instead of one, not only increases the robustness and scalability of the system in time-sensitive and hazardous events such as oil spills, but also in spatiotemporal oil spill cases increases the accuracy of measurements by multi-sampling the environment concurrently. Marine environmental monitoring tasks can strongly benefit from these advantages, as the monitoring areas are typically large, and communication with a central control unit might not always be available. Among these obvious advantages, more work needs to be done to understand the capabilities and limitations of autonomous systems and the resources required in the marine environment and ensure their acceptable use to the regulatory agencies.

In this presentation we first review a number of arial drones developed in ARAS, which are very promising in such application. Then a review on swarm robotics concepts and potential research gaps are given. Finally, The application of oil spill monitoring and cleanup in Persian Gulf is given professional notice. Since the monitoring of the oil spill expansion on the water surface is a spatiotemporal problem, we also address the oil spill modeling by a Gaussian mixture model, which is based on NOAA’s advanced oil spill model (GNOME). Furthermore, a cooperative control framework developed for a group of Unmanned Aerial vehicles (UAVs) will be introduced as a novel strategy in oil spill monitoring in the Persian Gulf.

Date & Time: Monday, Nov. 30, 2020 (10 Azar 1399) | 18:00-20:00 (+3:30 GMT Tehran local time) | 9:30-11:30 (-5:00 GMT Canada Eastern Time Zone)

Webinar Video 01 | Webinar Video 02 | Webinar Video 03 | Webinar video 04

ARAS Research on Haptic Technology in Intraocular Surgeries

Hamid D. Taghirad

Seyed Farzad Mohammadi

Mohammad Motaharifar

This fact underlines the importance of assistive technologies in eye surgical procedures. The assistive technologies aim at giving extra manipulation to the surgeon during the operation or help the novice surgeons to obtain the required skills before performing actual operations at the surgical room. This presentation reviews novel recent breakthroughs along with new areas in which haptic systems and assistive technologies might provide a viable solution to overcome current challenges. Furthermore, ARAS Haptic system developed for eye surgery training will be introduced as a novel system used in intraocular surgeries.

Time & Date: Monday, Nov. 2, 2020 | 18:00-19:30 (+3:30 GMT Tehran local time) | 9:30-11:00 (-5:00 GMT Canada Eastern Time Zone)

Webinar Video 01 | Webinar Video 02 | Webinar Video 03 | Webinar Video 04

Group Website | Poster | Presentation File | Webinar Details | Read More

ARAS Research on Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning Methods in Autonomous Robotics

Artificial intelligence has found its permanent place among cutting-edge researches in various applications. In particular, the deep learning approaches are very promising with optimized solutions for a variety of real-world problems. Considering the enhanced computational capability to execute these algorithms on embedded systems such as NVIDIA Jetson boards with an outstanding performance, deep learning approaches are progressively employed in autonomous robotics. As a major part of each autonomous robot, a camera plays a significant role to extract rich information on the surrounding environment.

Object detection and tracking is a necessary task for the autonomous robot to maneuver suitably in an unstructured environment. Furthermore, these methods are very promising in other applications like monitoring and evaluating a process. Regarding the tracking task, estimation of the depth is of high importance to realize a 3D object in the environment. It is usually critical to have a depth map of the robot’s frontal view, which may be considered as a more comprehensive requirement for autonomous vehicles. In this presentation, a review of the ARAS autonomous robotics group on the development, implementation, and optimization of deep learning approaches especially in image processing are addressed. We aim to focus on applications used for autonomous robots and vehicles and introduce some of our recent industrial projects.

Date & Time: Monday, Sept. 28, 2020 | 18:00-19:30 (+4:30 GMT Tehran local time) | 9:30-11:00 (-4:00 GMT Canada Eastern Time Zone)

Webinar Video 01 | Webinar Video 02 | Webinar Video 03 | Webinar Video 04

Webinar Details | Poster | Presentation File | Read More

Hamid D. Taghirad

Mr. Faraz Lotfi

Mr.Amin Kashi

ARAS Research on Parallel and Cable Robotics: Products and Algorithms

Hamid D. Taghirad

Seyed Ahmad Khalilpour

Cable and parallel robotics have been gaining more attention among researchers due to their unique characteristics and applications. Simple structure, high payload capacity, agile movements, and simple structures are the main characteristics that nominate cable-robots from the other types of manipulators for many applications such as imaging, cranes, agriculture, etc. The ARAS Parallel and Cable Robotics (PACR) group is focused on the development of such novel manipulators and their possible applications. Interdisciplinary research fields such as dynamics and kinematic analysis using classic and modern approaches, development of easily deployable robots thorough robust controllers, implementation of novel self-calibration algorithms, and establishing modern and multi-sensor perception systems for them are among the active lines of research in this group. The theoretical results of this active research group are also directly incorporated for producing commercial products through the spin-off and startup companies originated from the team.

Kamalolmolk® robot is a representative of such products, which is a fast deployable edutainment cable-driven robot for calligraphy and painting (chiaroscuro) applications. Additionally, PACR exploits the simplicity of cable robots combined with SLAM and perception algorithms to create commercial inspection and imaging robots for various applications. In this webinar, the underlying concepts of such robots, and the current state-of-the-art development of the group will be presented.

Date & Time: Monday, August 31, 2020 | 18:00-19:30 (+4:30 GMT Tehran local time) | 9:30-11:00 (-4:00 GMT Canada Eastern Time Zone)

Webinar Teaser | Webinar Video 01 | Webinar Video 02 | Webinar Video 03

Webinar Details | Presentation File | Poster | Group Website

ARAS eye surgery training system: A VR/AR Approach

The virtual reality and augmented reality are getting more interest as a training technique in the medical fields unlocking significant benefits such as safety, repeatability and efficiency. Furthermore, VR/AR based simulators equipped with a haptic device can be used in medical surgery training in order to achieve skill improvement and training time reduction. With haptics as part of the training experience it is observed that a 30% increase in the speed of skills acquisition and up to a 95% increase in accuracy is achieved. Six out of nine studies showed that tactile feedback significantly improved surgical skill training.Eye surgery training is considered for VR/AR based training in ARAS group as it is one of the most complex surgical procedures. The ARASH:ASiST haptic system is integrated into the eye surgery training system in conjunction with a physical simulation engine and the unity software to visualize the simulation results in Oculus VR headset. The hand motions of the expert surgeon is captured by a haptic system where later the motion data is used to train the hand motions of surgery students by force feedback.

In the developed eye surgery training system, two types of eye surgeries are simulated, namely the cataract and vitrectomy. In each type of eye surgery, the haptic system is used to simulate the surgery tool motion. The interaction of the virtual surgery tool with the 3D modeled eye is computed through the SOFA framework. The simulation results are transformed to the unity game engine in order to visualize the results in an Oculus VR headset.

Time & Date: Monday, August 3, 2020 | 18:00-19:30 (+4:30 GMT Tehran local time) | 9:30-11:00 (-4:00 GMT Canada Eastern Time Zone)

Webinar Teaser | Webinar 01 | Webinar 02 | Webinar 03

Webinar Details | Presentation File | Poster | Group Website

ARAS Public Webinars

Invited By CeRVIM, Laval University

Parallel and Cable Robotics Research: Theoretical and Technological Advancements

Prof. Hamid D. Taghirad

Abstract:

CeRVIM Link | Teaser | Poster

ARAS Current and Future Research: Developed Products and Algorithms

Prof. Hamid D. Taghirad

Webinar Video

Cable-Driven Parallel Robots: Control Challenges and Solutions

Mohammad A. Khosravi

Assistant Professor, Amirkabir University of Technology

Webinar Teaser

Safe Reinforcement Learning (SRL) Using Control Barrier Functions

Zahra Marvi

Webinar Teaser

Artificial Intelligence and Haptic Technology in Intraocular Surgery Training (IFEES)

Prof. Hamid D. Taghirad

Safe and Resilient Autonomous Navigation in Highly Dynamic Environments

Dr. Golnaz Habibi, Ph.D.

Research Scientist, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, MIT

10th Translational Ophthalmology Research Center Seminar

Hamid D. Taghirad

Parisa Abdi

Elham Ashrafi

Seyed Farzad Mohammadi

Mohammad Motaharifar

Hamid Riazi Esfahani

Alireza Norouzzadeh

ARAS Research on Swarm Robotics in Oil Spill Monitoring and Cleanup

Hamid D. Taghirad

Farzaneh Abdollahi

Samaneh Kaviri

ARAS Research on Haptic Technology in Intraocular Surgeries

Hamid D. Taghirad

Seyed Farzad Mohammadi

Mohammad Motaharifar

ARAS Research on Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning Methods in Autonomous Robotics

Hamid D. Taghirad

Mr. Faraz Lotfi

Mr.Amin Kashi

ARAS Research on Parallel and Cable Robotics: Products and Algorithms

Hamid D. Taghirad

Seyed Ahmad Khalilpour

ARAS eye surgery training system: A VR/AR Approach

Hamid D. Taghirad

Alireza Norouzzadeh