Autonomous Incubator Seminar Series:
TOYOTA PARTNER ROBOTS: ACHIEVING HARMONY WITH PEOPLE
Dr. Joseph Djugash, Principal Research Scientist, Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing North America, San Jose
January 20, 2015, 10:00 am, NASA LaRC Reid Center
Hosts: Danette Allen (NASA) and Fred Brooks (NIA)
Abstract:
Toyota has been developing industrial robots since the 1980s. In recent years, Toyota has accelerated its focus on developing cooperative robots that assist people in daily tasks in practical, real-world applications. Focused on enhancing the quality of life and mobility for all, Toyota has developed products that support elderly, disabled, nursing & security staff and assembly workers. In this talk, I will present a selection of these products that Toyota has developed and detail some of the research challenges that were overcome along the way to developing these products. Some scenes of Partner Robot operation in each of these four fields will be shown, and the essential technologies embedded in those Toyota Partner Robots will introduced in the presentation. Lastly, the pending issues that need to be resolved to enable these robots to be truly useful and practical in our society will be described.
Biography:
Dr. Joseph Djugash is a Principal Research Scientist at the Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing North America, San Jose. He received his Bachelors in Computer Engineering from University of Minnesota and his Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University. After joining Toyota in 2011, Dr. Djugash has been leading a multitude of research projects including visual object recognition, 3D scene reconstruction/understanding, image segmentation, visual positioning (localization/SLAM) and autonomous navigation. He has authored more than a dozen academic papers at a variety of international conferences/journals and holds numerous patents in the field. Currently, Dr. Djugash leads the efforts within Toyota to bring computer vision and robotics research technologies to products across multiple sectors, such as healthcare, robotics, mobility assistance and manufacturing.