EAISI lecture 2 by visiting professor Lorenzo Natale

TITLE

Building reactive behaviors for robotics with behavior trees - lecture 2

ABSTRACT

Programming robots to perform complex tasks requires proper integration of sevral component and real-time orchestration. Behavior trees (BTs) have been proposed as a formalism to design and implement robot behaviors that are intrinsic reactive, modular and easier to read. In this talk I will revise our work with BTs and how they have been used in our laboratory to implement complex behaviors with humanoid robots. I will also illustrate some extensions to BTs that address specific problems in robotics and how BTs have been integrated in the robot software architecture, using the example of a robotic museum guide developed in the EU project 5GTOURS. Finally I will present how BTs are being used in the context of the EU project CONVINCE at the top layer of the robot deliberation system, and preliminary work towards formalization of BT to support verification of robot behaviors. 

BIOGRAPHY

Lorenzo Natale is Tenured Senior Researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology and coordinator of the Center for Robotics and Intelligent Systems. He received his degree in Electronic Engineering (with honors) and Ph.D. in Robotics from the University of Genoa. He was later postdoctoral researcher at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He was invited professor at the University of Genova where he taught the courses of Natural and Artificial Systems and Antropomorphic Robotics for students of the Bioengineering curriculum. In 2020 and 2021 he was visiting Professor at the University of Manchester.

Lorenzo Natale has contributed to the development of various humanoid platforms. He was one of the main contributors to the design and development of the iCub platform and he has been leading the development of the iCub software architecture and the YARP middleware. His research interests range from vision and tactile sensing to software architectures for robotics.

He has been principal investigator and co-principal investigator in several EU funded projects (FP7, H2020 and Horizon Europe), and he is currently coordinator of the Horizon Europe project CONVINCE. He was general chair of IEEE ARSO 2018 and served as Program Chair of ICDL-Epirob 2014 and HAI 2017 and associate editor for IEEE-Transactions on Robotics and IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. He is Specialty Chief Editor for the Humanoid Robotics Section of Frontiers in Robotics and AI. He is Ellis Fellow and Core Faculty of the Ellis Genoa Unit.