Nikos Tsourveloudis

Nikos Tsourveloudis - Technical University of Crete (GREECE)

Nikos Tsourveloudis received his Diploma in Production Engineering and Management, and his PhD in Industrial Engineering, both from the Technical University of Crete (TUC), Chania, Greece. Currently, he is a Professor and Director of the Machine Tools Lab and the Intelligent Systems and Robotics Lab at TUC. From 1992 to 1995 he was the President of the Association of Industrial Engineers of Greece. During the academic years 1997 and 1998, he worked as a Research Scientist at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Louisiana, USA. Later, he was a visiting professor at the University of South Florida, Tampa. His research interests are in the areas of intelligent control, modeling and scheduling of flexible and computer integrated manufacturing systems, autonomous operation/navigation of robotic vehicles, virtual reality and fuzzy logic applications. Dr. Tsourveloudis is a member of numerous professional and scientific organizations. The NSF and LEQSF, the European Union, the Hellenic GSRT, the EADS-3SIGMA and other private companies have funded his research.

RESEARCH STAY AT UC3M: SYSTEMS ENGINEERING AND AUTOMATION DEPARTMENT

PROJECT: The on-going research at UC3M is an outgrowth of my research on the navigation and control of field robots. An objective is to study and define the required level of autonomy for a group of robots with different built-in capabilities. We follow the bio-inspired paradigm: Humans and animals make inferences about unknown features of their world under the constraints of limited time, limited knowledge, and limited computational capacities. And despite their cognitive limitations tend to built and use domain specific heuristics that allow for quick “problem solving”. We intend to make important parts of this knowledge applicable to the navigation/coordination problem of heterogeneous robotic teams. Dr. Tsourveloudis’ research group has been honored with several prizes and awards, among which the most recent ones are: the 3rd EURON/EUROR Robotic Technology Transfer award (2009), the 1st ADAC Safety award (2010), and a TUC award for excellent research achievements (2010).

Stay Period: JAN 11 - JUL 11