About the project
Technology is transforming society and the way we work and interact. We are surrounded by technology and computer interfaces that gradually become more intelligent and are able to adapt to our needs and preferences. Thanks to progress in machine learning and artificial intelligence, we see a major transition from ourselves adapting to fixed technology and services to these by themselves adapting to us human users. Thus, technology works more seamlessly in a continuously increasing number of domains. This includes robots that have traditionally only been used for manufacturing but are now arriving at work and at home as service robots. The success of these would be highly dependent on their behavior capabilities that depend on the robot´s skills in learning and adaptation.
There has in 2017 been interaction between staff from all project partners in various ways including through e-mail, Skype and physical meetings. Physical meetings with project partners in Brazil (Institute of Informatics, UFGRS and Brazilian Institute of Robotics at Senai CIMATEC) were undertaken in April with return visit from UFGRS in June in Oslo. Visits to potential new partners in Japan were undertaken in January and a partner visit to Kyushu University is planned in October. We met with a representative from our partner at Wyoming University, US in a conference in Berlin in July and the other US partner (JPL) visited us in Oslo in September. Guest lectures have been held in Oslo and in two locations in Brazil, six in total, in addition to some other guest lectures presenting the project at other institutions. The ambassador of Norway in the Brazil, Aud Marit Wiig, also visited our partner collaborators at UFGRS in April.
The project in managed by the Robotics and Intelligent Systems (ROBIN) research group at the University of Oslo. This is a research group with regularly about 30 master students, 10 PhD students and 5 postdocs in addition to the three faculty staff. The current student exchange (for autumn semester 2017 and spring semester 2018) funded by the project consists of two incoming master students from UFGRS in Brazil and one outgoing master student to Kyushu University.
Objectives
- Develop long-term relation with leading international research groups in US, Brazil and Japan to foster excellence in research and teaching for our research group.
- Improve quality in teaching (regarding e.g. syllabus, teaching material, assignments)
- Contribute to better integrating research in the teaching and contribute to students earlier getting insight in and hopefully more motivated for doing research (incl. motivate students for doing PhD).
Sub-projects
- Rio Grande do Sul and Oslo collaboration on AI and Robotics (ROCAIR, 2017–2018)
Financing
INTPART/Research Council of Norway and Norwegian Centre for International Cooperation in Education (SIU, now) (2017–2020 + 2020–2023)
Cooperation (some of the partners)
- Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Porto Alegre, Brazil
- Artificial Intelligence Research group, Institute of Informatics
- Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC), Brazil
- Applied Computational Intelligence Laboratory
- Brazilian Institute of Robotics (BIR), SENAI CIMATEC, Salvador, Brazil
- Kyushu University, Japan
- Laboratory for Intelligent Robots and Vision Systems
- Toyohashi University of Technology, Japan
- Department of Computer Science and Engineering
- University of Massachusetts, US
- Autonomous Learning Lab
- University of Wyoming, US
- Evolving Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
- NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), US
- Robotic Systems Estimation, Decision, and Control Group