November 2009: BIRG's research on the iCub is featured in a radio documentary on IEEE spectrum, see here. October 2009: BIRG's research is featured in a short documentary on the Swiss TV, see here and here.
October 2009: New!: open PhD studentship in learning and control for compliant legged robots, see here. September 2009: Auke Ijspeert is promoted to associate professor (with tenure), see here.
August 2009: Renaud Ronsse joins BIRG as a postdoc to work on the EVRYON project.
August 2009: The iCub robot developed by the RobotCub consortium is featured in a news article in Nature see here.
The Biologically Inspired Robotics Group (BIRG) is part of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at the EPFL. We work on the computational aspects of movement control, sensorimotor coordination, and learning in animals and in robots. We are interested in using robots and numerical simulation to study the neural mechanisms underlying movement control and learning in animals, and in return to take inspiration from animals to design new control methods for robotics as well as novel robots capable of agile locomotion in complex environments.
Our research interests are therefore at the intersection between robotics, computational neuroscience, nonlinear dynamical systems, and machine learning. We carry out research projects in the following areas: numerical simulations of locomotion and movement control, dynamic simulators of articulated rigid bodies, systems of coupled nonlinear oscillators for locomotion control, adaptive dynamical systems, design and control of amphibious articulated robots, control of humanoid robots, design and control of reconfigurable robots. See the Research overview and the Research pages for more details.
Our research is currently funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, the European Commission (Information Society Technologies), the EPFL, and the Swiss SystemsX initiative in Systems Biology. Previous fundings came from the US National Science Foundation, the European Space Agency, the Swiss Commission for Technology and Innovation (CTI), the French Ministère de la Recherche et de la Technologie, and Microsoft Research Cambridge.
BIRG participates to the following on-going EU-funded projects:
Contact: Prof. Auke Jan Ijspeert
School of Computer and Communication Sciences
EPFL, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
EPFL-IC-ISIM-GRIJ INN 237, Station 14
CH 1015, Lausanne, Switzerland
Tel: (+41) 21 693 2658 Fax: (+41) 21 693 3705
