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Professor of Department of Electrical EngineeringDirector of CCNY Robotics Lab and PRISM Center
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Dr. Jizhong Xiao is a Professor and PhD program advisor at the Department of Electrical Engineering of the City College of New York(CCNY), the flagship campus of City University of New York (CUNY), as well as a doctoral faculty member of the Ph.D. program in Computer Science at the CUNY Graduate Center. He received his Ph.D. degree from the Michigan State University in 2002, Master of Engineering degree from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore in 1999, M.S, and B.S. degrees from the East China Institute of Technology, Nanjing, China, in 1993 and 1990, respectively. He started the Robotics Research Program at the City College in 2002 and is the Founding Director of CCNY Robotics and Intelligent Systems Laboratory (website: http://robotics.ccny.cuny.edu) and the Center for Perceptual Robotics, Intelligent Sensors and Machines (PRISM Center). With his leadership, the robotics research has become one of the most active and well-funded research directions in the EE department of CCNY. His current research interests include robotics and control, cyber-physical systems, autonomous navigation and 3D simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), real-time and embedded computing, wall-climbing robots for non-destructive evaluation of infrastructure, assistive technology, multi-agent systems and swarm robotics. He has published more than 150 research articles in peer reviewed journal and conferences. Dr. Xiao received the U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2007 and the CCNY Outstanding Mentoring Award in 2011, and Humboldt Research Fellowship for Experienced Researchers from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany in 2013~2015.
Mobile Robots Against Gravity for Non-destructive Inspection of Infrastructures
It has been a long-time dream to develop mobile robots with the ability to climb walls, walk on ceilings, crawl through pipes, and transit between horizontal and vertical surfaces, thus transforming the present 2D world of mobile rovers into a new 3D universe. This talk will first present the state-of-the-art of wall-climbing robots and then introduce the research progress and technical achievements at The City College of New York (CCNY) in developing novel climbing robots and the non-destructive evaluation (NDE) technologies. The wall-climbing robot prototypes include the City-Climber, Rise-Rover, and GPR-Rover to carry out inspection missions of infrastructure (dams, bridges, tunnels, and building façade, etc.). The wall-climbing robots not only provide vertical mobility but also carry an RGB-D camera to detect surface flaws (i.e., cracks) and a ground penetration radar (GPR) to inspect subsurface defects (i.e., delamination). By using image processing, machine learning, and visual odometry techniques, the robot can localize and measure the surface flaws with high accuracy. By combining the robotic motion control with highly accurate positioning information, our approach disrupts the conventional GPR signal processing technique in analyzing and visualizing the GPR signal that allows the regular users easy to understand.