1
Wednesday (18th September)
Registration
Opening ceremony
Plenary session
4 sessions
Welcome cocktail
2
Thursday (19th September)
4 sessions
Visit at the museum of Nature and Humankind (Museo della Natura e dell’Uomo)
Gala dinner and award ceremony
3
Friday (20th September)
2 sessions
Closing ceremony
Plenary Session
Pedro Neto – University of Coimbra
From robotics foundations to collaborative robots that share the workspace with humans
Robots are becoming increasingly popular for assisting humans in work and daily tasks. Designing robotic systems and applications requires integrating multiple complex components, from perception and robot task control to the hardware itself. Achieving the ideal of flexible and general robot interfaces capable of perceiving and adapting to unstructured environments where robots naturally collaborate with humans remains a significant challenge. This talk presents recent advances in safe collaborative robotics and the role of artificial intelligence in this field. Future research challenges will be discussed, as well as the issues related to the effective deployment of these technologies. Laboratory and industry use cases will be presented.
About Pedro Neto
Pedro Neto is full Professor at the Mechanical Engineering Department and coordinator of the Robotics and AI Group at the University of Coimbra. He is a two-time recipient of the Impact and International Publications Award at the Faculty of Science and Technology, received more than a dozen awards, and is in World’s Top 2% Scientists Rank from Elsevier. Pedro Neto served as vice president of the Portuguese Robotics Society, is a member of the IEEE Committee on Factory Automation, associate editor in refereed journals, and scientific committee member of flagship conferences. His current research interests include human-robot interaction and collaboration, machine learning, soft robots, and advanced robot applications in the manufacturing domain. He co-authored more than 100 papers and collaborated with more than 100 companies in projects and consulting, some of them granted by the European Commission in the prestigious HORIZON framework.
