Ali Akbari
Senior Robotics Research Engineer
Dyson Technology Ltd.
I am a researcher in Robotics at Dyson, Hullavington,
The United Kingdom.
Previously, I was a Postdoc researcher at Royal Holloway University of London. I worked on exploration planning in subterranean environments. I addressed the exploration robotics tasks by employing different AI methods. I did my Ph.D. in "Combining Task and Motion Planning for Mobile Manipulators" which deals with different types of robotic manipulation problems. I received Best Doctoral Award. I developed a number of combined task and motion planning approaches using ontological knowledge and physics-based motion planning. The approaches tackle manipulation problems referred to as mobile manipulation, collaborative multiple mobile robots tasks, and even higher dimensional tasks (including robots like bi-manual or mobile manipulators). Moreover, I proposed combining task and motion planning under uncertain information and with human-robot interactions. Uncertainty can be viewed in the initial state of the robot world or the result of manipulation actions. The works have been tested in simulation, and also with practical examples in real environments. The robots used are YuMi, TIAGo-PAL, and KUKA-LWR.
My research interests include:
- Robot Manipulation Planning
- Artificial Intelligence in Robotics
- Learning Techniques for Human-Robot Interactions
