Guest lecture by Jeff Trinkle (National Robotics Initiative, USA)Prof. Dr. Jeff Trinkle, BrainLinks-BrainTools associate member and currently head of the National Robotics Initiative (NRI) of the United States, will be with us for an afternoon.
Trinkle's primary research interest lies in robotic manipulation and simulation methods for multibody systems interacting through physical contact. Under the continuous support of the NSF since 1989, he has written many articles on theoretical issues underpinning the science of contact problems in robotics. One of these articles developed a now-popular method for simulating multibody systems with intermittent contact, which was implemented in physics engines like NVIDIA PhysX.
He has formerly held faculty positions in the Department of Systems and Industrial Engineering at the University of Arizona and the Department of Computer Science at Texas A&M University. Before he was offered his position with the NRI, Trinkle served as Chair of the Computer Science Department and Director of the CS Robotics Lab at Rensselear Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. In 2010, he was Humboldt fellow at the Technische Universität München and in the same year, was also elected fellow of the IEEE. The NRI research program he's working on at the moment was specifically endorsed by Barack Obama as a Presidential Initiative that funds research projects with budgets totaling approximately $40,000,000 per year.
In his presentation, Trinkle will provide an overview of the first four years of the NRI, share a few perspectives on its performance, and briefly describe a few exemplary projects, including one that could significantly improve simulation and perception of robotic manipulation and grasping tasks.
The guest lecture is jointly organized by BrainLinks-BrainTools and CITEC, a cluster of excellence located in Bielefeld. CITEC employees will be able to watch the lecture via livestreaming.
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