Ribin Balachandran conducted research at DLR as a doctoral student of MIRMI-PI Prof. Alin Albu-Schaeffer. For his doctoral thesis in the Department of Sensor-based Robot Systems and Intelligent Assistance Systems at TUM, he pursued the question of how to make humans and automatic systems work together in a stable (safe) manner to control robots. The particular challenge was to develop a control system that would function reliably even in the event of delays in the network. With Balachandran, it is the third time in the last five years that a scientist from one of the TU Munich's "MIRMI Chairs" has come out on top.
Nico Mansfeld among Top 4: How human-robot interaction is becoming safer
Nico Mansfeld wrote his doctoral thesis in the Chair of Robotics and Systems Intelligence, reaching the final round of the Top 4. In Sami Haddadin, he was also mentored by a professor who had himself received the George Girald Phd Award in 2012 and mentored the later winner Teodor Tomic in 2019. In his doctoral thesis, Mansfeld is looking at how the interaction between humans and robots can be made safe - both for robots with rigid and flexible joints. Ultimately, new control and regulation procedures emerged on the basis of the work.
George Giralt Phd Award: Most important robotics Phd Award in Europe
The George Giralt Phd Award is considered the most important prize for outstanding doctoral theses in the field of robotics in Europe. Since 2002, the prize has been awarded annually at the European Robotics Forum by the euRobotics AISBL to one or a maximum of two up-and-coming roboticists.
Further information
Phd Thesis by Ribin Balachandran
A Stable and Transparent Framework for Adaptive Shared Control of Robots
In mixed-initiative haptic shared control of robots, humans and automatic control system work in parallel. The command to the robot is a weighted sum of forces from these two agents. This thesis develops control methods to improve the force feedback performance for mixed-initiative shared teleoperation and to adapt the control authority between human and automatic control system in a stable manner even in the presence of communication delays. All methods are validated on real robotic hardware.
Phd Thesis by Nico Mansfeld
Safety Awareness for Rigid and Elastic Joint Robots: An Impact Dynamics and Control Framework
This thesis aims at making robots with rigid and elastic joints aware of human collision safety. A framework is proposed that captures human injury occurrence and robot inherent safety properties in a unified manner. It allows to quantitatively compare and optimize the safety characteristics of different robot designs and is applied to stationary and mobile manipulators. On the same basis, novel motion control schemes are developed and experimentally validated.