Portrait of Professor Mandyam V. Srinivasan

THE 2021 ANNUAL BIOENGINEERING LECTURE

The Bioengineering Lecture (formerly ‘Bagrit Lecture Series’) is the foremost prestigious annual lecture hosted by the Department of Bioengineering.

The first five lectures were named after Sir Leon Bagrit in recognition of the great contribution made in his name to the Department and hence the discipline of Bioengineering through the Sir Leon Bagrit Trust.

Speaker: Professor Mandyam V. Srinivasan

Lecture title: Visual guidance of flight in bees and birds, and applications to aircraft guidance

Abstract: Flying insects and birds are remarkably adept at seeing and perceiving the world and navigating effectively in it. This presentation will describe our recent progress in understanding how honeybees and birds (Budgerigars) use their vision to guide and control several aspects of their flight such as regulating flight speed, negotiation narrow passages, selecting routes, and avoiding mid-air collisions, using computational principles that are often elegant and unprecedented.

It will conclude with an update of our advances in the design and testing of biologically inspired vision systems for the guidance of autonomous aerial vehicles.

Biography: Srinivasan is a professor at the Queensland Brain Institute and the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at the University of Queensland. His research focuses on the principles of visual processing, perception, and cognition in simple natural systems, and on the application of these principles to machine vision and robotics.

He holds a B.E. in Electrical Engineering from Bangalore University, an M.E. in Electronics from the Indian Institute of Science, a Ph.D. in Engineering and Applied Science from Yale University, a D.Sc. in Neuroethology from the Australian National University, and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Zurich. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, of the Royal Society of London, and of the German Academy of Science.


BIOINSPIRED GUIDANCE, NAVIGATION AND CONTROL SYMPOSIUM

Portraits of speakers for the Bioinspired GNC Mini Symposium and Bioengineering Lecture

Following Professor Srinivasan’s lecture will be the Bioinspired Guidance, Navigation and Control Symposium with guest speakers from Google Deepmind, the University of Konstanz, University of Würzburg, and Imperial College London giving talks on their research into autonomous robot navigation, neural mechanisms of compass orientation in insects and computational approaches to motor control.

Event Schedule:

Start End Session Speaker
09:00 09:15 Introduction for the Annual Bioengineering Lecture
09:15 10:15 Visual Guidance of Flight in Bees and Birds and applications to aircraft guidance Prof Mandyam Srinivasan
University of Queensland
10:15 10:30 Vote of thanks and break Prof Holger Krapp 
Imperial College London
10:30 11:00 Spatial AI for Mobile Robots Dr Stefan Leutenegger
Imperial College London and
The Technical University of Munich
11:00 11:30 Egocentric and allocentric heading representation in the monarch butterfly compass Dr Basil el Jundi
University of Wuersburg
11:30 11:40 Q&A / break Dr Huai-Ti Lin
Imperial College London
11:40 12:10 Individual and collective sensing in locust swarms Dr Einat Couzin-Fuchs
University of Konstanz
12:10 12:40 Embodied control of virtual humanoid and animal bodies Dr Josh Merel
Google Deepmind
12:40 12:50 Q&A / break Dr Huai-Ti Lin
Imperial College London
12:50 13:20 Panel discussion on Bioinspired Guidance, Navigation and Control: Smart moves and moving smartly Dr Huai-Ti Lin
Imperial College London
13:20 13:30 Closing remarks Professor Simon Schultz
Imperial College London

 

Registration is now closed. Add event to calendar
See all events