The Department of Electrical Engineering at the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering (SBASSE) held a talk on ‘Robots with Artificial Immunity’ on November 22, 2019. Dr. Ali Raza, Assistant Professor of Mechatronics and Control Engineering, University of Engineering and Technology (UET), Lahore presented the talk.
The first half of the talk focused on the development of multi-tier immunological framework for different robotic applications. The innate and adaptive part of immunity was discussed and how these concepts can be employed in solving different robotic problems. The underlying bio-inspiration, mathematical representation, hierarchy, maturation, response-regulation, immune-memory, etc. were also discussed.
The second part of the talk was aimed at discussing how robots’ own immune system can be developed using the insights developed in the first half. The autonomous fault-detection and recovery-actions performed by Robot’s Immune System (RIS) while maintaining internal health indicators was part of the discussion. Dr. Raza also spoke about how these immunity-based systems are used to enable dynamic reconfiguration and graceful degradation of robotic systems in unstructured environments.
Dr. Raza heads UET Lahore’s AI and Robotics Lab as well as Human-Centered Robotics Lab of the newly established National Center of Robotics and Automation. He earned his doctoral degree from the University of Texas at Austin on immunity-based heterogeneous robotic systems; prior to that, he did his Masters in Mechatronics Engineering from UET Lahore and BE in Mechanical Engineering from NUST.
Dr. Raza has taught in a variety of different settings: educational, vocational, and industrial and national and international. His primary research interests, on the other hand, revolve around using artificial immune systems for different robotics problems with strong connections to robots’ heterogeneity and reconfigurability. He also has a strong interest in human-centered mechatronics and sports-biomechanics as well.
