Prestigious Award for ARMLAB-ers: "The HARDONS- SIMONS Prize"

The ARMLAB members (Hrishi Shah, Sumit Tripathi, Dr.Leng Feng Lee and Dr.Venkat Krovi) bagged "2010 Hardon-Simons Prize"- an annual award given for the outstanding Computers in Education Journal paper on computational methods to commemorate the unselfish contributions of Richard C. Harden and Fred O. Simons, Jr. to the Computers in Education Division. The title of the work is "Role of Automated Symbolic Generation of Equations of Motion to Enhance Robotics Education" that was published in CoED Division of ASEE April-June 2011 Journal.
The award comprises of a Certificate and a cash prize of 400 USD to the authors. You can also find a list of previous recipients of the Harden-Simons Prize in the picture below.

"Best Poster Award" at 23rd Annual CSE Graduate Research Conference

We, in ARMLAB, get together in congratulating Priyanshu Agarwal for receiving the best poster award at 23rd 
Annual
 CSE
 Graduate 
Research
 Conference. The topic of Priyanshu's poster is "Articulated Body Pose Estimation in Monocular Video" that is based on estimating body pose parameters "on-the-fly" with a monocular video sequence. The award recognizes the tackling of a challenging problem in the field of computer vision. In this work, the authors propose the use of dynamics-based statistical motion models (particle-filtering based framework) to estimate the pose of an articulated multi-body system, solely from monocular images .
It is to be noted that Priyanshu won this award amidst a group of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) research graduates who also participated in this competition.

Tech Savvy - 2011 Robotics Workshop

As has been the tradition over the previous years, the Automation, Robotics, & Mechatronics Laboratory hosted the Robotics Workshop and Outreach Program for the third consecutive time as a part of this year's "Tech Savvy 6-Tech Savvy Girls with No Limits… Anything! Anywhere!" by working together with AAUW-Buffalo branch on March 12, 2011.  The outreach program comprised of an overview presentation of robotics/mechatronics, virtual reality/haptics, and virtual prototyping given by Dr. Krovi (click here to download PPT slides: here) and "touchy-feely" hands-on demos for workshop participants.

The session was attended by approximately 45 students from different parts of the country (split evenly into 3 sessions), who belonged mostly between 6th- 9th grade. The students were able to get hands-on experience with mechatronic-systems, mobile robots as well as interact with haptic interfaces motivating them to learn about novel applications of modern robotics and mechatronics.

Farewell to Luca Carbonari (visiting scholar), Welcome Dr. Wensong Hu !!!

Finally, ARMLAB members bid farewell to Luca who has been working in ARMLAB since September 2010. He was a visiting scholar from Italy (Università Politecnica delle Marche) and today was his last day in the lab. It was a great to have him amidst our research group. We had a farewell party for Luca at ARMLAB's favorite meet up spot -- "Kebab and Curry" which was attended by all the ARMLAB members.
We congratulate Luca on successful completion of his stint in ARMLAB and wish him all the best for a prosperous career.
At this juncture, we also would like to welcome our new ARMLAB member-- Dr. Wensong Hu, a visiting scientist from China. He brings with him a great deal of experience in the field of robotics and his research expertise is considered to be a greater boost to the ARMLAB community. More details about his work in ARMLAB will follow in the coming days...

Looming IEEE RAS Deadlines

**AIM 2011: 2011 IEEE/ASME International Conference on Advanced
Intelligent Mechatronics.Budapest. 4-6 July 2011.  Submissions deadline
extended to  February 20, 2011. http://www.aim2011.org/
**ICMA 2011: 2011 IEEE International Conference on Mechatronics and
Automation. Beijing, Aug 07, 2011 - Aug 11, 2011. Deadline March 20,2011.
http://2011.ieee-icma.org.

**CASE 2011: 2011 IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and
Engineering. Aug 24, 2011 - Aug 27, 2011. Deadline February 11, 2011.
http://www.deei.units.it/CASE2011/ .

**IROS 2011:IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and
Systems. San  Francisco CA. Sept 25-30, 2011.  Submissions due March 14,
2011. http://www.iros2011.org.
--------------------