Autonomous Systems: Emerging & Future Tech Special Panel
Monday, October 5
Description coming soon.
Panelist: Richard Mills
Vice President Marine Robotics Sales
Kongsberg Maritime
Richard leads the marine robotics sales team for the HUGIN family of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles and Sounder Unmanned Surface Vehicles. He is based in the United Kingdom and has a global remit encompassing commercial, defence, governmental and scientific market segments. His team is geographically spread around the world, and he has further access to support from local Kongsberg Maritime offices in more than 30 countries. Prior to joining Kongsberg in 2012, Richard held a similar position with International Submarine Engineering Ltd. of British Columbia, Canada. He has been involved with autonomous underwater vehicles for 13 years, but has a long history of interest and operation of complex systems. Away from the subsea industry, Richard has a passion for classic cars, guitars, running and rugby union.
Panelist: Dr. Tom Curtin, APL-UW
Thomas Curtin is Senior Scientist at the Applied Physics Laboratory, University of Washington. He has served as Chief Scientist at NATO Undersea Research Centre in Italy, Program Manager at US Office of Naval Research, Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University, and oceanographer at Fisheries Research Institute, Malaysia. He holds BS, MS, PhD and MBA degrees from Boston College, Oregon State University, University of Miami, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Awards include US Navy Meritorious Civilian Service Medal, the U.S. Navy Superior Civilian Service Medal, the U.S. Coast Guard Arctic Service Medal and Fellow of the Marine Technology Society.
Speaker: Professor Hanumanth Singh
Professor, Northeastern University (Boston, MA)
Hanumant Singh is a Professor at Northeastern University (NU) where he is also the Director of the multidisciplinary Center for Robotics at NU. He received his Ph.D. from the MIT WHOI Joint Program in 1995 after which he worked on the Staff at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution until 2016 when he joined Northeastern. His group has designed and built the Seabed AUV, as well as the Jetyak Autonomous Surface Vehicle, dozens of which are in use for scientific and other purposes across the globe. He has participated in 60 expeditions across the world.
Speaker: Professor Dr. Ralf Bachmayer
University of Bremen
Dr. Bachmayer is Professor for Marine Environmental Technology and Deepsea Engineering as part of the Innovation Center for Deep-Sea Environmental Monitoring supported by the Werner Siemens-Foundation at MARUM – University of Bremen, Germany. His main research interests lie in the domain of marine robotics with a focus on unmanned marine systems. In particular he is interested in the design, control and networking of heterogeneous marine observation systems.Dr. Bachmayer received his engineering degree in electrical engineering from the Technical University of Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe, Germany in 1995. He worked at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the USA as a visiting researcher. His research was on the development of the terrain following algorithm for the Autonomous Benthic Explorer (ABE). He received the M.Sc. (1997) and Ph.D. (2001) degrees in mechanical engineering from the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland working on experimental identification and nonlinear and adaptive control of underwater thrusters. After completing his Ph.D. he joined Prof. Naomi E. Leonard’s Dynamical Control Systems Laboratory at Princeton University as a Research associate from 2000 – 2003 working on multi-vehicle applications and adaptive sampling with AUVs and underwater gliders. In the Fall of 2003 he joined the National Research Council Canada Institute for Ocean Technology in St. John’s continuing his work with underwater gliders and AUVs. In 2008 he became Associate Professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John’s where he started in 2009 the Autonomous Ocean Systems Laboratory (AOSL), developing unmanned marine vehicles and systems for harsh environments. Besides other systems his research group developed an iceberg profiling system consisting of the semi-submersible USV SEADRAGON working in tandem with an hybrid underwater glider for autonomous iceberg profiling. He joined University of Bremen’s Center for Marine Environmental Sciences (MARUM) and Department of Computer Science and Mathematics in July 2017. He holds a Professorship in Marine Environmental Technology/Deep-Sea Engineering at the University of Bremen, Germany. His research group is currently developing a new generation of AUVs for minimally invasive seafloor exploration.
Speaker: Professor Nikola Miskovic
University of Zagreb
Nikola Mišković is a Full Professor at University of Zagreb, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing where he teaches control engineering related courses. Currently he is the Vice Dean for Research. His research activities are conducted within the Laboratory for Underwater Systems & Technologies (LABUST, https://labust.fer.hr/). He participated in 14 European projects (H2020, FP7, DG-ECHO, INTERREG) out of which he coordinated FP7 CADDY, focussing on the development of the first underwater robot for interaction with divers; H2020 aPad, devoted to commercialization of an autonomous surface vehicles developed in LABUST, and H2020 EXCELLABUST devoted to increasing LABUST excellence in marine robotics. He also participated in 4 Office of Naval Research Global (ONR-G) projects (coordinated 3), 2 NATO projects, and 7 national projects (coordinated 3). He published more than 70 papers in journals and conference proceedings in the area of navigation, guidance and control, as well as cooperative control in marine robotics. Prof. Mišković is a senior member of IEEE (president of Chapter for Robotics and Automation of the Croatian Section from 2016 to 2019), IFAC (member of the Technical Committee on Marine Systems) and Centre for Underwater Systems and Technologies (vice-president since 2010). He participated in 8 conference international programs committees, he is member of 2 journal editorial boards and he serves as a technical reviewer for various international journals. In 2013 he received the young scientist award “Vera Johanides” of the Croatian Academy of Engineering (HATZ) for scientific achievements, and he received the annual State science award for 2015, awarded by the Croatian Parliament.