Abstract

Human heavily relies on visual feedback from eyes to control his/her motion.  To develop a robotic vision system that functions like human eyes, one of the crucial and difficult problems is how to effectively incorporate visual information to motion control of a robot whose dynamics is highly nonlinear. This talk presents our recent efforts and latest results on vision-based control of robotic systems. The controllers developed embed feedback from visual sensors into the low-level loop of robot motion control. It will be demonstrated that by an innovative and simple design of the visual feedback, we can solve several difficult problems in visual servoing such as uncalibrated dynamic visual servoing, trajectory tracking of nonholonomic mobile robots without position measurement, visual odometry, and model-free manipulation of deformable objects like soft tissues. Applications of the visual servoing approaches in robotic surgery will be also introduced.

Bio

Yunhui Liu received his B. Eng. degree in Applied Dynamics from Beijing Institute of Technology, China, in 1985, his M. Eng. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Osaka University in 1989, and his Ph.D. degree in Mathematical Engineering and Information Physics from the University of Tokyo, Japan, in 1992.  He worked at the Electrotechnical Laboratory, MITI, Japan from 1992 to 1995 as a Research Scientist. He has been with Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong since 1995, and is currently a Professor, Director of Networked Sensors and Robotics Laboratory, Director of Medical Robotics Laboratory. Professor Liu is interested in vision-based robot control, medical robotics, aerial robotics, multi-fingered grasping, and robot applications. His research has been widely funded by the Research Grants Councils, the Innovation and Technology Fund, and the Quality Education Fund in Hong Kong, and by the national 863 and 973 programs in Mainland China. He has published over 200 papers in refereed professional journals and international conference proceedings. He has received a number of best paper awards from international journals and major international conferences in robotics.  He is the Editor-in-Chief of Robotics and Biomimetics and an Editor of Advanced Robotics, and was an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation. He was listed in Highly Cited Authors (Engineering) by Thomson Reuters in 2013. Professor Liu was the General Chair of 2006 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). He is a Fellow of IEEE.