Robotics, GPU and research.

This page gives a brief overview of my final year project, which can be downloaded here . Project Title: Mars Science Laboratory Physics and AI Simulation Supervisor: Prof….

This research was supported by EU-Cognition for a period of five months after finishing my final year project. During the last two months we researched the possibility of…

This research was also supported by EU-Cognition and during the first three months I have completely reworked the 3D Mars rover as well as the whole simulator. The main focus…

I am doing PhD research in composition of actions and language for iTalk project, which aims to develop artificial embodied agents able to acquire complex behavioural,…

Journals J. Zhong, M. Peniak, J. Tani, T. Ogata, A. Cangelosi (submitted). Sensorimotor Input as a Language Generalisation Tool: A Neurorobotics Model for Generation and…

The Mars Rover Simulator project is based on evolutionary robotics paradigm where an artificial agent aquires its skills through the process of artificial evolution. The…

I have added pictures from the California, LA where I went to present my work at IJCAI (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intellignece). During the first 3days I…

A promotional video for Plymouth robotics created by Jonathan Palfrey, Nick Guest, Lucy Smith, Tom Crossman, Sean Lowe from South Devon College.

Evolutionary Robotics is a technique which has recently received growing attention from the robotics research community as it promises the automatic synthesis of controllers….

Team from Channel 5 visited our lab today to do some filming for their Gadget Show . In this show they will be presenting different robots and our iCub humanoid robot will be…

ESA collaboration enters the public record.

Photo gallery have been updated with new pictures from our recent visit to European Space Agency in Netherlands. In addition, the ESA – evolution in robotic islands research…

I have uploaded new pictures from Capri island in Italy where we had our iTalk project meeting. Full album can be viewed here .

One of the first milestones in our ESA project was to integrate our Mars rover simulator with paGMO libraries taking care of island model approach to artificial evolution. This…

Test of the neural network and paGMO. The image below shows different configurations of GA parameters and their influence on the performance of GA. In this particular case the…

The Centre for Robotics and Neural Systems (CRNS) Inaugural Workshop will be held on Thursday 26 and Friday 27 November 2009 at the University of Plymouth. Keynote speakers are…

New ESA project wiki was created and will be used to publish all the preliminary results and to discuss new ideas and agree on future experimental setups. This is the place…

I am doing PhD research in composition of actions and language for iTalk project, which aims to develop artificial embodied agents able to acquire complex behavioural,…

The gallery was updated with the latest pictures from Amsterdam and Noordwijk in Netherlands, where I stayed for two weeks during my visit to ESA – European Space Agency.

A short video summarizing the main idea behind the Mars rover research that I started 2 years ago and since then we have explored lots of interesting ideas including the…

G. Genta (2010). A Small Robotic Rover for Titan Exploration. Special Issue: Aosta 2009 Symposium

I will be presenting our new results from the experimental studies conducted in collaboration with The Advanced Concepts Team (ACT) of European Space Agency (ESA) during The…

I would like announce that you can now leave your comments to all the posts on this website. Registration is not required, however, it is encouraged since it will save you more…

I have produced another Q&A video of Thomas Campbell answering questions about virtual reality and perspectives in general. This video was recorded during the "Your place in…

Increasing number of projects that rely on computer simulations inspired us to order more servers that would do the hard work for us. Our collaborative project with the…

We have been accepted another paper for The 10th International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence for oral presentation in Sapporo, Japan. This paper presents experiments…

The iCub is a small-size humanoid robot being designed by the RobotCub Consortium, consisting of several European universities. The main goal of this platform is to study…

Barry Bentley and I went to Exeter to present our research on the autonomous Mars rover in collaboration with Advanced Concepts Team (ACT) of European Space Agency (ESA). We…

I am traveling to Noordwijk, Netherlands this Thursday to visit European Space Agency again and do a final presentation summarising the whole project, experimental results and…

Peniak M., Bentley B., Marocco D., Cangelosi A., Ampatzis C., Izzo D., Biscani F. (in press). An evolutionary approach to designing autonomous planetary rovers. TAROS-2010:…

Our team visited the robotics laboratory of European Space Agency shortly after my talk finalising the ' Evolution in Robotic Islands ' project done with collaboration of the…

In this section you can find some of the software that I developed either during my undergrad studies, collaboration with the European Space Agency, NVIDIA or for my PhD….

A robot toddler could have much to teach artificial intelligence (AI) researchers and psychologists alike, by providing a simplified non-human model for early child…

Introduction Aquila is an open-source project that was inspired by the recent advancements in supercomputing making use of GPU enabled devices such as the NVidia Fermi cards…

Aquila is an open-source project that was inspired by the recent advancements in supercomputing making use of GPU enabled devices such as the NVidia Fermi cards resulting in a…

This video demonstrates how Aquila trains and runs multiple time-scales recurrent neural networks used to control humanoid robot iCub ( http://www.robotcub.org/) in real time….

Henry Markram says the mysteries of the mind can be solved — soon. Mental illness, memory, perception: they're made of neurons and electric signals, and he plans to find them…

This section contains resources that you might find useful if you work with iCub humanoid robot, iCub simulator, using Aquila or building your own supercomputers and…

I have added a new section where I am going to be keeping all the resources that are related to my research and are likely to be useful to others. Some of these are for example…

17 November 2010 note on We made the university's frontpage in the robotics, gpu and research thread.

”It can’t continue forever. The nature of exponentials is that you push them out and eventually disaster happens.” This is the statement of Intel co-founder Gordon Moore who is…

The race is on for scientists who are seeking answers to important problems impacting our lives. This 17-minute pilot of a documentary series depicts how scientific discovery…

GPU computing becomes central to the PhD work.

I was recently asked by NVidia to write a short article about the role of parallel computing in my research. Click here to see the article on the NVidia website.

M. Peniak, A. Morse, C. Larcombe, S. R. Contla, A. Cangelosi (in press). Aquila: Massively Parallelised Developmental Robotics Framework. Postgraduate Conference for Computing:…

My recent article previously published on NVIDIA website got lots of attention and was subsequently used for creating a Q&A interview published today in NVIDIA Newsletter and…

I have just released a new version of Aquila that features new Vision module running on parallel GPU devices. The Vision module was developed through the integration of OpenGL,…

The burgeoning neural networks of fruit fly pupae solve a distributed computing problem, arranging sensory bristles in a very efficient, effective manner. Scientists who…

One of the server hard-drives stopped working. Instead of just fixing the problem I also decided to rearrange four out of six GPU servers to make them more accessible as two of…

Benny J Johnson , a young photographer who studies press and editorial photography in Falmouth, came to visit our lab and took some great pictures of the iCub humanoid robot….

Aquila 1.5 beta has been released and uploaded to iTalk, iCub and Aquila SourceForge repositories. This release marks a significant step towards to the main objectives of the…

I have received a confirmation today that our paper on Aquila was accepted for publication for the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN2011). I can only…

New version of Aquila is out and uploaded to Aquila, RobotCub and iTalk repositories. This version includes significant improvements, additions and bug fixes. One of the most…

I was invited to present my research at The Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava and the time and venue have just been confirmed. If you are interested in the subject…

Aquila 1.7b has just been released and implements some cool features such as iCub teleoperation using Kinect camera The very first demonstration of this module took place…

M. Peniak, D. Marocco, J, Tani, Y. Yamashita, K. Fischer and A. Cangelosi (in press). Multiple Time Scales Recurrent Neural Network for Complex Action Acquisition….

Aquila and CUDA presented in California.

I have presented some of the preliminary results on iCub action learning during the two most prominent conference series of the field of developmental robotics, the…

New version of Aquila 1.75b was just released. This release caught-up with the latest versions of CUDA, OpenCV, Qwt and YARP and should be easier to install. Aquila manual has…

I would like to announce that we have just released a new version of Aquila. This is the first alpha version (v1.8a), which is much more stable that the previous versions….

I would like to announce that we have just released a new version of Aquila, which has several new features such as new vision filters and transforms, GPU face and template…

International Conference on Intelligent Robots and System took place at Hilton hotel in San Francisco. The conference was extremely busy and had over 1000 attendees. Giorgio…

Invited NVIDIA HQ presentation context.

Google have been working hard on their autonomous vehicle, which has already driven over 190 000 miles. Last month's IROS conference, where I demonstrated Aquila , was also the…

The GPU robotics work enters NVIDIA's public stage.

In 2009, PhD researcher and my good friend Frédéric Delaunay from The University of Plymouth pioneered a novel design for a humanoid face. Fred is doing his PhD as part of The…

Our humanoid robot iCub is going to be upgraded with new touch sensors and artificial skin. First, the robot's hands will be sent to IIT where skilled technicians will install…

iCub humanoid robot updates on Facebook and YouTube . The photograph below was taken by Miguel A. Romero.

The California and NVIDIA transition, preserved as a key life moment.

On 20 June, 2012 Anthony Morse and myself are doing an NVIDIA GTC Express Webminar on Aquila and cognitive robotics research. These are the topics covered: Introduction to…

The NVIDIA GTX Express on Aquila went really well. I have put the slides on SilideShare together with the videos. It seems they spread really well on the internet, enjoy!

My first few weeks at NVIDIA have been a great experience. I have improved couple of modules in Aquila and run a benchmark comparison of their performance on GTX590 and…

We have implemented a multi-GPU version of the back-propagation through time algorithm for the training of MTRNN (multiple time-scales recurrent neural network). We have also…

PASADENA, Calif. — NASA's most advanced Mars rover Curiosity has landed on the Red Planet. The one-ton rover, hanging by ropes from a rocket backpack, touched down onto Mars…

15 August 2012 note on 360 Interactive Mars Panorama from Curiosity in the robotics, gpu and research thread.

If you are a CUDA parallel programmer but sometimes you cannot wrap your head around thread indexing just like me then you are at the right place. Many problems are naturally…

12 November 2012 note on CUDA by numbers in the robotics, gpu and research thread.

It has been few years since I started looking into CUDA as a way of speeding up my software. At the beginning I was impressed with the reported speedups of neural network…

Aquila 2.0 becomes the stable software-architecture record.

There are times where each of looks for a little bit of extra motivation. I personally love reading short and inspirational quotes that brighten up my day, divert my attention…

Welcome to NVIDIA CUDA Training course run by Plymouth University CUDA Teaching Center , one of the first centers in United Kingdom that isspecialsed in CUDA. This is the very…

1 August 2013 note on GPU – The Future is Now in the robotics, gpu and research thread.

I have updated my CV with the new publications, GPU training and media coverage. It can be downloaded from here .

27 September 2013 note on iCub – connecting actions with language in the robotics, gpu and research thread.

The physical end of the PhD-writing years.

I am happy to announce that I will be doing a TED talk in the Slovak National Theatre, Bratislava. This will be the very first TED talk on GPU computing and its application to…

This is probably the last post regarding my PhD. I have printed four copies of my thesis. Two for my parents, one for the best supervisor in this world Angelo Cangelosi and one…

Here is the TEDx video with English subtitles. I hope you will enjoy it 🙂 To enable subtitles, click CC on the bottom right part of the video.

NVIDIA's later public feature on the GPU robotics work.

The iCub video appearing in a public museum context.