Amir Patel Seminar

Friday 27^th January at 11:00am in LR7 (note different time)

Speaker: A/Prof. Amir Patel, African Robotics Unit, University of Cape Town, South Africa Abstract:

Manoeuvrability is paramount to survival for animals and will be equally important to legged robots if they are to ever leave the safety of the laboratory. The cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus) is the pinnacle of maneuverability and can rapidly accelerate and initiate turns at high-speed on unpredictable terrain. However, biomechanics researchers are still far from understanding the whole-body control of cheetah locomotion as conventional GPS/IMU collars cannot provide the required data. In this talk I will discuss my lab’s efforts towards the challenging problem of understanding the locomotion of the cheetah. We do this through the lens of robotics and employ novel techniques including multi-body modelling, feedback control, computer vision & deep learning, physical robots, and trajectory optimization. These results are also relevant to the design of future legged robotic systems which will perform time-critical tasks in unstructured world.

Amir Patel is a robotics researcher with over 14 years of experience in both industry and academia. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Cape Town (UCT), as well as the director of the African Robotics Unit (ARU). His research involves studying the manoeuvrability of robotic and biological systems such as the cheetah. He has held visiting professor positions at Carnegie Mellon University and Johns Hopkins University. Some of his accolades include a Google Research Scholar (one of the first two African recipients), two Oppenheimer Memorial Trust Fellowships, a Mathworks Research Award (the first ever African recipient) and the National Research Foundation (NRF) Emerging Researcher Award. He is currently a visiting professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford hosted by Prof. Andrew Markham.