Ricardo A. Téllez

This morning, student Javier Collado has presented his Master project based on my thesis distributed neural architecture. He applied this architecture to the control of a simulated khepera robot to simulate some of Nolfi's experiences, and later, developed a software to automatically generate distributed neural controllers. This software was tested on the control of a simulated Aibo head that has to localize the ball an follow its trajectory.
Score obtained: 10 out of 10!. Congratulations, Javier!

Today I have been interviewed at Radio Barcelona of Cadena Ser about my research on autonomous robots and the implications of using robots on humans' everyday life.
The interview went through several issues including home robots, exoskeletons, artificial protheses and conscious robots.
An mp3 file (20 minutes, 4.3Mb) containing the interview can be found here (in Catalan).

It was supposed that today morning I had to give a talk at the Urbi workshop, about the differences between synchronous and asynchronous modes of programming in Urbi when performing a complex dynamic task (Aibo walking controlled by neural nets).
The Urbi workshop is an event organized by Jean-Christophe Baille at ENSTA about the URBI programming interface for Aibo (or in general, any other robot). Unfortunately, a big strike in France has not allowed me to reach Paris, and I will not be able to give my talk scheduled at 11:40 am (see the program here). On my place, my colleague Diego Pardo will gently give my talk.
For all interested on my talk, you can find the abstract, presentation, videos and Urbi implementation examples here.

I have been invited by the University of Yamaguchi in Japan to give a talk about my research on distributed neural controllers. If you are in Japan by the fourth week of January, you can listen to my talk the 25th at Yamaguchi University (in Japanese) or the 26th at the Bio-ADIT conference in Osaka (in English).
Jun Nishii sensei has prepared a web page and a pdf poster about my talk at Yamaguchi.
Slides of my talk can be found here in Japanese or here in English.

Today, the Spanish national journal 'El Pais' has released an article about our research activities on Aibo gait generation using neuro-evolution. You can find a pdf of the article here (only in Spanish), or a direct link to the electronic version of the newspaper here (also in Spanish, with no pictures :-(

I have just started a short stage at EPFL working with Dr. Olivier Michel and Prof. Auke J. Ijspeert on the generation of deliberative walking control for the Aibo robot.

I have added a new page explaining how we made it to implement dynamic gaits on the Aibo robot using only neural nets. You can find you can find all the details here.

While doing my research for the generation of walking patterns in the Aibo robot using distributed neural nets (the results of this are shown here), I generated a small document for myself containing all the basic knowledge required to understand and do research in the Walking Robots field. A lot of people asked me for that document to help them introduce in the field, so I decided to make it public on my web. You can find it in the Publications section under Useful Documents.

I have created a complete manual of the R-CODE scripting language for Aibo, covering all aspects about programming Aibo using this environment. By the moment, it is only available in Spanish (translators wanted!).
This manual is email-ware. It means that you must send me an email if you download the manual and read it. Common, it's not so difficult!!.
You can find the manual here.

The teaching material used for the Second Aibo Programming Summer Course is released and available for free. This includes an OPEN-R programming tutorial that describes the environment, Webots integration, and a simple neuro controller for Aibo. A FeedForward neural network object is also released for the easy use with OPEN-R. You can find all this material here.

From 18th to 22th July we will teach the second edition of the summer course on Aibo programming. This year we have been sponsored by Cyberbotics so Aibo simulator Webots will be used as well as real Aibo with Open-R. This year's course will be more practice focused with neural algorithms being implemented in both simulator and real robot. More information can be found at Campusmed (only in Spanish and Catalan), and here (in English). If you require information, please contact me.

Research results obtained until now and future work with the Pavlovian experiment will be presented in a poster session during the EURON annual meeting in Warsaw, Poland, next February the 16th.

The Pavlovian experiment starts today. This projects aims at creating a neuro-evolved controller for an Aibo robot, that will allow the robot to learn a Pavlovian conditioning (sound follows food). The neural controller is evolved without human intervention an needs to evolve the capacity of learning. Both simulator (Webots) and real robot (Aibo) will be used.

From the 6th to the 10th of September of 2004, I will teach a special 20 hours summer course on Aibo programming and intelligent robotics during the Mediterranean University Campus Summer Course. This University course is open to everybody aiming to know how to program a Sony Aibo robot. Deep knowledge of C++ programming is required. You can find more information here (sorry, only available in Spanish. Please contact me if you want more information in English).