João Bimbo

João Bimbo, BSc, MSc
PhD Student

linkedin academia

Email: Joao.Bimbo@kcl.ac.uk

 

Biography

João Bimbo is a PhD student in the Centre for Robotics Research. He graduated in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Coimbra, Portugal in 2011. He was an Erasmus exchange student at DTU (Danish Technical University) in 2008/2009 and carried out his MSc project again as an exchange student at King’s College London. He started his PhD studies in October 2011, within the FP7-funded EU project HANDLE in the field of sensing for robot grasping.

Description of Research

Robot grasping and manipulation require very accurate knowledge of the object’s location within the robotic hand. Current systems rely mostly on vision to locate an object, which might limit the robot’s ability in terms of robustness and speed. My current research tries to fuse information from different sensors in order to have a faster and more accurate knowledge of a grasped object’s pose.

After acquiring an object’s 6D pose from a 3D camera (Microsoft Kinect), the robot should adapt the knowledge of the object’s location as it touches, grasps or manipulates it. Preliminary results show that this information can be improved by finding a transform on the object’s point cloud that minimises the distance from the object’s surface to the contact locations on the finger tips.

Research Interests

  • Robot grasping and manipulation
  • Tactile sensing
  • Sensor fusion
  • Grasping unknown objects
  • Estimation of object’s physical properties

Publications

Conferences

H. Liu, J. Greco, X. Song, J.Bimbo, L.D. Seneviratne, K. Althoefer “Tactile Image Based Contact Shape Recognition Using Neural Network”, in Proc. of IEEE International Conference on Multisensor Fusion and Information Integration (MFI 2012), 2012 (Nominated for Best Paper Award).

J. Bimbo, S. Rodríguez-Jiménez, H. Liu, X. Song, N. Burrus, L.D. Seneviratne, M. Abderrahim, K. Althoefer, “Object Pose Estimation and Tracking by Fusing Visual and Tactile Information”, in Proc. of IEEE International Conference on Multisensor Fusion and Information Integration (MFI 2012), 2012.

H. Liu, X. Song, J. Bimbo, L.D. Seneviratne, K. Althoefer, “Surface Material Recognition through Haptic Exploration Using an Intelligent Contact Sensing Finger”, in Proc. of IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2012), 2012.

X. Song, H. Liu, J. Bimbo, K. Althoefer, L.D. Seneviratne, “A Novel Dynamic Slip Prediction and Compensation Approach Based on Haptic Surface Exploration”, in Proc. of IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2012), 2012.

A. Jiang, J. Bimbo, S.F. Goulder, H. Liu, X. Song, P. Dasgupta, K. Althoefer, T. Nanayakkara, “Adaptive Grip Control on an Uncertain Object”, in Proc. of IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2012), 2012.

H. Liu, J. Bimbo, K. Althoefer, L.D. Seneviratne, “Object surface classificaiton based on friction properties for intelligent robotic hands”, World Automation Congress (WAC), 2012.

Book Chapter

H. Liu, X. Song, J. Bimbo, K. Althoefer, L.D. Senerivatne, “Intelligent Fingertip Sensing for Contact Information Identification”, Advances in Reconfigurable Mechanisms and Robots I, 2012.

Workshops

J. Bimbo, X. Song, H. Liu, L.D. Senerivatne, K. Althoefer, “Active Perception of Objects for Robot Grasping”, Cognitive Assistive Systems: Closing the Action-Perception Loop Workshop at IROS 2012, 2012.

J. Bimbo, “Managing coordinate frames with ROS”, Handling ROS – Introductory tutorial to ROS and its use for robot in-hand manipulation Workshop at IROS 2012, 2012.