SOCIETY NEWS•

Chapter Activities

Many IEEE Robotics and AutomationSociety (RAS) Chapters have beenvery active last year. The major eventsreported to us are the following:l Chile Chapter, Javier Ruiz-del-Solar,

chair: Members of the Chile Chapterorganized the 4th IEEE Latin Amer-ican Summer School and PosterCompetition on Robotics, Decem-ber 2010 (http://www.evic.cl/eng-lish/). Plans for the 2011 event are inprogress.

l Portland (Oregon) Chapter, Edward C.Epp, chair: Oregon Robotics Tour-nament and Outreach Program(ORTOP), a program within theOregon University System Chan-cellor’s office, is an affiliate partnerof the FIRST competition. It sup-ports robotics programs for 6–18-year olds. Epp was the ORTOPchair of the FIRST Tech Challenge(FTC), which serves the high-schoolstudents. In 2009, Epp, an Intelengineer, gave more than 600 h tothe FTC, and other members of theRAS Chapter as well gave time.

l United Kingdom/Republic of Ire-land Chapter, John Gray and Dar-win Caldwell, chairs: The Chaptersponsored a symposium on reflex-ive control of humanoid robots atManchester university (50þ at-tendees). They are cosponsoring the12th Conference Toward Autono-mous Robotic Systems (TAROS)event later this year. The main eventon automation will be the Sympo-sium on Advanced Automation inthe food industry to be held at ABBheadquarters, Milton Keynes, in

May. This will be supported by alarge industry-sponsored exhibi-tion of state-of-the-art automa-tion solutions in the sector.

l Galveston (Texas) Joint AES/C/EMB/PE/RA/VT Chapter, S Taqvi:The Chapter organized an all-daydual Workshop on Automationand Robotics (WAR) and INNO-VATION on 12 November.

We look forward to the learning ofother Chapter activities.

IEEE Automaton BlogOne of the most popular and reliabletechnoblogs on the Web is Spectrum’sAUTOMATON blog. Both Editor

Erico Guizzo and Senior Writer EvanAckerman are RAS members, andcontributors include Society MembersJeanne Dietsch, Markus Waibel, andSamuel Bouchard. Several posts relat-ing to the possibilities and limitationson using robots in disaster areas, suchas the earthquake and nuclear eventsin Japan, provided a welcome-realitycheck.

RAS YouTube ChannelThe RAS YouTube Channel provideslinks to cool, real robot videos sent tous by our members (in contrast to thefaked ones that are plentiful on theWeb). For an example of one of our

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2011.941641

Date of publication: 14 June 2011

1070-9932/11/$26.00ª2011 IEEE JUNE 2011 • IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE • 123

•Chapter Date Approved Chair

Croatia Section 18 November 2010 Zdenko Kovaciac

Guadalajara Section (Mexico) 13 October 2010 Bernadino Castillo Toledo

Indonesia Section Joint CS/RA 19 February 2011 Muhammad Murti

New Hampshire Section 19 February 2011 Michael Sousa

Worcester County Section 13 January 2010 Taskin Padir

•Student Branch Chapter Date Approved Advisor

Instituto Tecnol�ogico PascualBravo (Colombia)

21 October 2010 Victor Henandez

Univ Distrital Francisco Jose DeCaldas, RA24 (Colombia)

16 July 2010 Ronald Gutierrez

Univ Nacional San Antonio Abaddel Cusco (Peru)

1 October 2010 Walter Utrilla Mego

Universidad de San Martinde Porres Peru

13 October 2010 Antonio Moran

Universidad Nacionaldel Callao, Peru

19 April 2010 Jorge Valerio-Araoz

University Technologica dePanama

30 December 2010 Karla C. Arosemena

newest links, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CR5y8qZf0Y&feature=player_embedded from RAS memberRaffaello D’Andrea’s laboratory atETH Zurich, which shows two auton-omous flying robots enjoying a bit oftennis.

New RAS ChaptersWe are happy to welcome severalRAS Section Chapters and studentbranch Chapters, which have beenrecently approved (see tables onprevious page). To organize a newRAS Chapter in your Section or

school, see http://www.ieee.org/about/volunteers/tab/creating_a_chapter.html#sect2 (new Section Chapter) orhttp://www.ieee.org/documents/2009_branchchapterpetition.pdf (studentbranch Chapter).

•

•Turning Point (continued from page 128)

PIC: Tell me about Stanford, who youwere working with, and how you gotfrom compliance to adaptive control?JJC: Stanford was a great place, and Iwas fortunate to work with, and learnfrom, Ken Salisbury, Oussama Khatib,Bernie Roth, Jeff Kerr, Tom Binford,and many others. Meeting OussamaKhatib, I realized that his work wasthe final missing piece to the hybridforce controller, since his way ofhandling dynamics could bring thefull dynamic decoupling needed tomake the hybrid force-controller

highly performant.So he and Iworkedon that. With KenSalisbury, I wrotethe control codethat was the firstto wiggle the fin-gers of his three-fingered hand,and he and I

wrote a paper that won the BestPaper of the Conference Award atthe American Control Conference. Istarted as a student of Tom Binford’s,but all my involvement with mechan-ical types got me more and more tothe mechanics and control aspects, andpartway through my Stanford years, Iswitched to Bernie Roth as my thesisadvisor. The thesis work ended upbeing on adaptive control, and what Iwanted to do was to add an adaptiveaspect to a controller that fullydecoupled the mechanism by means ofa dynamic model, either in joint orCartesian spaces. The adaptive elementwould just tune-up the parametersappearing in the dynamic model usedby the control computer. Every other

adaptive controller present before Istarted this work used adaptation toavoid computing a complete dynamicmodel, but computers were now fastenough to compute the model, so Ithought that the adaptation should beused to learn the correct parametervalues appearing in that model. I stillthink it’s the way to build a highly per-formant adaptive controller.

PIC: So how do you top thatexperience?JJC: Hard to top it, it was a lot of fun,and I learned a lot.

PIC: When did you write thetextbook?JJC: Bernie Roth was teaching therobotics course at Stanford, andwhen he was going away for a year onsabbatical, he asked if I wanted toteach it while he was gone. I was suf-ficiently nervous (teaching my firstcourse) that I decided to rather labo-riously develop detailed notes tohand out in class—and by writingout everything, it helped me get myteaching act together. I had time todo it, because Bernie asked me to teachabout nine months before the class wasto start. At the end of the course, thenotes formed the core of the book. Butit took two or three more years to turnthe notes into a book. I did that whilebeing a graduate student and workingon the thesis too. So both the book andthesis came out in 1986.

PIC: So the book on adaptive con-trol came out after this one? Thatwas a pretty productive period ofwriting. What came next?

JJC: The first textbook was prettyexciting to Addison-Wesley (theoriginal publisher) at the time, andthey actually pursued me to writeanother or a follow-on book. I sug-gested that my Ph.D. thesis could beturned into a book, and they wantedto do that. We knew that it would bea very different kind of book, morelike a monograph, and would not goto as large a market as my Introduc-tion to Robotics textbook. In theend, the second book was literallyalmost a copy of my thesis—only afew words got changed. As predicted,it was for a rather specialized audi-ence, and went out of print a few yearslater whereas the first textbook hasgone on to a second and now a thirdedition and continues to be usedtoday. Both the textbook and thesis(obviously) were finished before Igraduated from Stanford.

While still finishing these up, I wasalso involved in a start-up company ina Silicon Valley called Silma. It hadbeen my plan to go with them full-timeafter graduating, and I ultimately did,but only after a brief flirt with the aca-demia. The University of California atBerkeley offered me a tenure trackposition, which I really hadn’t pursued,so I was surprised by the offer and suf-ficiently flattered that I accepted. Butsoon afterward realized that I did wantto do the Silicon Valley start-up afterall, and so, regretfully, left Berkeleyreally before I ever got started there.

PIC: What did Silma do, and whatdid you do there?JJC: Silma created an offline program-ming tool for industrial robots. One

•Silma created an

offline programming

tool for industrial

robots.

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124 • IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE • JUNE 2011