Biomimetics - An evolutionary transformation from biological systems to intelligent robots
Inspired from nature, robotics researchers are currently working on a new field of biomimetics using bio-principles, bio-processes and bio-mechanisms in order to realise an evolutionary transformation from biological systems to intelligent robots. As a result, intelligent robots are soon ready to serve us in our homes, hospitals, offices and everywhere. They are autonomous, interactive and intelligent, inspired from behaviour demonstrations of biological systems. A number of new application areas have received significant interests in the robotics community, including service robots, medical robots, education robots and entertainment robots, etc. However, these robots face a number of challenges. Firstly, they have to deal with uncertainty within the systems, such as sensor noise, actuator inaccuracy, and components failure. Secondly, they have to handle a huge uncertainty in the real world, which is dynamically changing over time. Thirdly, they have to learn something new from their daily operations for robustness just as biological systems did for hundreds and thousands years. Finally, human-robot interaction is a key for success, including robots communicating with humans and navigating around homes. In this talk, I will briefly overview the current state of art robotics technologies, and present some research work toward the development of advanced theory and technologies based on biological inspiration. More specifically, bio-system modelling, smart wheelchairs, service robots and swarm robotics are discussed respectively, and some preliminary results are demonstrated via video