The 2021 Annual Bioengineering Lecture + Bioinspired Guidance, Navigation and Control Symposium

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

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: