esra.icer

Fellows_Profile

Nationality: 

Turkish

Institute/School: 

TUM

My Bio: 

Esra Icer is an Early Stage Researcher (ESR) at the Technische Universität München as of July 2014. She received her B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Istanbul Technical University, Turkey in 2011 and 2013 respectively. She worked as a Research Assistant from 2011-2014 at the Mechanical Engineering Department of Istanbul Technical University. Since July 2014 she has been working as a research assistant at the chair for Robotics and Embedded Systems, Department of Informatics, Technische Universität München. She is involved in the EC FP7 SMART-e Project as an ESR10.

Her research interests include design and analysis of modular robots, path planning and obstacle avoidance, and optimization. 

What I do in Smart-E: 

ESR10: Optimal Configuration of Modular Robots for Given Tasks

Modular  robots  have  been  the  subject  of  much  research  interest  because  of  their  high  versatility, easy maintenance, interconnectability, low cost and robustness. However, a limiting factor to their uptake is an inability to know how they should be best assembled for certain tasks or sets of tasks.  The  combination  of  the  modular  hardware  and  modular  software  enables  the  required robot structure for a given task to be determined.

The research goal of the project is to find the optimal configuration of modular robots automatically, for any given task. As part of the project, task definition and analysis are performed and the constraints are defined. Using path planning and obstacle avoidance algorithms, it is checked whether the goals are reached. Among all possible configurations the optimal one is obtained.

Research interests: 

Design and analysis of modular robots, path planning, and obstacle avoidance, and optimization.

Publications: 

[1] Icer, Esra, Andrea Giusti, and Matthias Althoff. "A task-driven algorithm for configuration synthesis of modular robots." Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2016 IEEE International Conference on. IEEE, 2016.

[2] Icer, Esra, and Matthias Althoff. "Cost-optimal composition synthesis for modular robots." Control Applications (CCA), 2016 IEEE Conference on. IEEE, 2016.

[3] Mesesan, George, Icer, Esra and Althoff, Matthias. "Hierarchical genetic path planner for highly redundant manipulators." Proc. of the Workshop on Task Planning for Intelligent Robots in Service and Manufacturing. 2015.

Supervisor: 

Prof Mathias Althoff