| NO SPEAKER AVAILABLE FOR THIS TALK |
| Thu 05 Nov 2015, 12:45 - 13:45 |
| 4.31/33, IF |
If you have a question about this talk, please contact: Steph Smith (ssmith32)
Speaker: Marco Caravagna
Talk Title: Sampling-Based Motion Planning for Whole-Body Humanoid Manipulation
Abstract: Humanoid robots are particularly well suited to perform tasks in unstructured and human-engineered environments because of their highly redundant kinematic structure and bipedal posture. Compared with fixed-based robots, they present better reaching capabilities and higher flexibility. However, these advantages add complexity to the problems of motion planning and control.
We present a method to plan reaching motions for humanoid manipulation. The algorithm is capable of producing collision-free trajectories and easy-to-execute motions by exploiting information on the robot arm capabilities and through a smart use of inverse kinematic solvers to reduce the dimensionality of the problem.
Speaker: Jon Bamber
Talk Title: Brain state dependent intensity encoding in the auditory thalamocortical systems
Abstract: The brain is always active, with incoming signals interacting with ongoing local activity. Such spontaneous activity changes with behavioural state, suggesting different modes of neural processing. For example, during deep sleep and anaesthesia the cortex operates in an `inactivated' state in which neurons collectively alternate between periods of high firing and near silence, whereas during REM sleep and wakefulness the cortex operates in an `activated' state characterised by ongoing desynchronised neural activity. In this talk I will review some work I have done involving quantifying information about stimulus intensity contained in spiking activity in the rodent auditory thalamocortical system, comparing between brain states.