ASME
Artificial Intelligence

and
Robotics
by Dr. Ferat Sahin
November 15, 2007

What is a Humanoid?

  

In recent years, people’s perspective of robots and robotics has been going through many changes. Twenty years ago, robots were functioning in the factories, mostly automotive industry. 

In recent years, mobile robots are introduced and they can be in the life of a common man. 

From a vacuum cleaner to personal helper, new mobile robots may offer great deal of help in many areas of life from entertainment to medical surgery.  With the mobility, the robots started look like human and animals.  This led the entertainment and toy industry to boom significantly. 

Now, they are in the operating room or in Mars helping human.  Even though the robots look like humans (humanoid term comes from here), their abilities are still quite limited in comparison to humans.  We will explore the human brain and computer comparison to actually see where we are in terms of designing human like machines with comparable intelligence.

FERAT SAHIN received his B.Sc. in Electronics and Communications Engineering from Istanbul Technical University, Turkey, in 1992 and M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in 1997 and 2000, respectively.  In September 2000, he joined Rochester Institute of Technology, where he is an Associate Professor.  He is also the director of Multi Agent Bio-Robotics Laboratory at RIT.  In 2006, he was with University of Texas San Antonio for his sabbatical as Visiting Research Associate Professor.  His current research interests are System of Systems, Swarm Intelligence, Robotics, MEMS Materials Modeling, MEMS-based Microrobots, Micro Actuators, Distributed Computing, Decision Theory, Pattern Recognition, Distributed Multi-agent Systems, and Structural Bayesian Network Learning. He has over 70 conferences and journals in these areas.  He is also the co-author of a book called “Experimental and Practical Robotics” by CRC Press. He has been a reviewer for leading journals and conferences in both the IEEE and other organizations. He serves as the Deputy Editor-in-Chief for International Journal of Computers and Electrical Engineering and as an Associate Editor for IEEE Systems Journal and AutoSoft Journal.

He has been an active IEEE member since 1996. He is a member of the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society, Robotics and Automation Society, and Computational Intelligence Society. Locally, he has served as Secretary (2003) and section Vice-chair (2004 and 2005) in the IEEE Rochester Section.  He has also been the Faculty advisor of IEEE student chapter at Rochester Institute of Technology from 2001 to 2003. He has been active in IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society since 2000. He has served as the Student Activities chair for the IEEE SMC Society in 2001, 2002, and 2003. He has been the Secretary of the IEEE SMC Society since 2003. He has received an “Outstanding Contribution Award” for his service as the SMC Society Secretary. He was also a member of the SMC Strategic Opportunities and Initiatives Committee and the SMC Technical Committee on Robotics and Intelligent Sensing.  He was the Publication Co-Chair for the IEEE SMC International Conference on System of Systems Engineering (SOSE 2007).  He will serve as the Technical Co-chair of the IEEE SMC International Conference on System of Systems Engineering (SOSE 2008).

Read more on his website