Meet the Jury Davide Brugali on Reconfigurable software control systems for autonomous robots

Arenberg Doctoral School is proud to invite you to Meet The Jury!

When internationally renowned experts visit KU Leuven as a member of a PhD Examination Committee, we like to seize this opportunity to give this expert a forum to a large audience. All members of Science, Engineering & Technology are most welcome to the Meet The Jury Lectures.

Prof. Davide Brugali (University of Bergamo, Italy) will give a lecture on “Reconfigurable software control systems for autonomous robots”.

Autonomous robots operating in everyday environments, such as hospitals, private houses, and public roads, are context-aware self-adaptive systems, i.e. they exploit knowledge about their resources and the environment to trigger runtime adaptation, so that they exhibit a behavior adequate to the current context. For these systems, context-aware self-adaptation requires to design the robot control application as a dynamically reconfigurable software architecture and to specify the adaptation logic for reconfiguring its variable aspects (e.g. the modules that implement various obstacle detection algorithms or control different distance sensors) according to specific criteria (e.g. enhancing robustness against variable illumination conditions). The talk will introduce the basic functionality of autonomous mobile robots, discuss the concept of software variability, and illustrate a conceptual model for reconfigurable robot control architectures.

Prof. Davide Brugali graduated in Electronic Engineering at Politecnico di Milano in 1994; he received the PhD in Computer Science from Politecnico di Torino in 1998. From 2001 until 2011 he was Assistant Professor at University of Bergamo. Since 2011 he is Associate Professor at the Department of Engineering of the University of Bergamo. He has been visiting researcher at the CMU Robotics Institute for one year between 1997 and 1998 and visiting professor at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in year 2006. He has been the founder and Co-Chair of the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on “Software Engineering for Robotics and Automation” and Associate Editor of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, and International Journal of Robotic Research. He is the main author of the book “Software Development – Case Studies in Java” published by Addison-Wesley in 2005. He is the coordinator of the Robotics Laboratory of the University of Bergamo. His research activity mainly focuses on software engineering methodologies and techniques for the development of robot control systems and applications.

Following the lecture, there will be opportunity for young researchers to interact with him.

• Venue: room 200A05.152 (Celestijnenlaan 200A) + via teams
• Date: 6 June 2025 – 11:00-12:00
• Prof. Davide Brugali is visiting KU Leuven on the occasion of the PhD defence of Jan Vermaelen