Kristin Y. Pettersen receives an ERC Advanced Grant on her first attempt. She gets it for her groundbreaking ideas for lightweight, flexible robots.

There is no shortage of praise when people describe Kristin Y. Pettersen and her research. - This is almost like receiving the Nobel Prize, says Morten Breivik, Head of department at the Department of Technical Cybernetics. - A fantastic recognition for both Kristin and the research communities, adds Dean Ingrid Schjølberg.

2,5 million Euro

The European Research Council (ERC) aims to promote high-quality research by investing in the best researchers and the best ideas. Pettersen has received 2.5 million Euros for her project CRÈME - Control of light vehicle-manipulator systems. This gives the opportunity to hire four doctoral fellows and two postdocs who will work on the project together with Pettersen herself for the next five years. 

• You have now received the most prestigious research scholarship a researcher can receive, and on the first attempt. How does it feel?
• It is amazing! I have worked extremely hard developing this project. That it went through on the first attempt is huge and a little unexpected, says Pettersen. The professor of cybernetics and robotics is one big smile after the news became known.

An interdisciplinary panel and 11 international experts have assessed the application. The panel writes "The panel was convinced of the strong element of innovation in the proposed control methods and technologies for the manipulators with light moving base".

Curiosity-driven research

An ERC Grant scholarship is awarded to inquisitive researchers. Willingness to take risks, new ways of thinking, working, and seeking answers are important. It is the researcher herself and the researcher's ideas that are emphasized. "High risk, high gain", says Pettersen and continues: This is not easy. This is not something you immediately know how to do. You are allowed to aim high, and you get to do something that is research wise very challenging. Something you are really curious about and want to find out!

Robots with arms

The goal is to develop mobile robots that are capable of performing many different tasks and that are autonomous and lightweight. The latter is important for them to be both safe for people and cheap. These robots should not only be able to observe the world around them, but also interact with the environment using one or more manipulator arms. While a robotic lawnmower can do a single task, these robots should be able to move freely around the world and perform many different jobs. These are robots that can fly out, find faults, and carry out maintenance on wind turbines far out at sea. Or they move out of a station on the seabed to carry out maintenance on aquaculture cages or subsea oil installations. They solve tasks on land and at sea and in the air as well, to put it as Askeladden.

A key to the success, and at the same time the research challenges, lies in the robot manipulator arms. What tasks they should solve and how they will manage this as the robots are lightweight and without fixed anchoring.

Ants and elephants

• What I want to achieve is the equivalent of "a flying ant juggling a grape in heavy winds".

To relate this to robotics, she launches the concepts of kinematics and dynamics. The movement of the ant's arm represents the kinematics, and the movement of the body represents the dynamics of the system. The challenge is that the movement of the arm when juggling (manipulating) the grape will affect the movement of the ant's body. This requires an immense coordination between the movement of the arm and the movement of the body so that the ant does not become completely unstable. We do not currently have sufficiently good methods to handle such tight coupling between kinematics and dynamics.

So far, one has therefore mainly made mobile robots where the robot body is large and heavy compared to the manipulator arm and its load. Then the kinematics and dynamics can be considered more separately. To stick to the animal world, the analogy we can think of here is "an elephant juggling a watermelon using its trunk". The movement of the trunk will naturally not affect the motion of the elephant's body to any great extent. However, in order to be able to create the lightweight and safe mobile robots that I want, it is necessary to develop a new control-theoretical framework that takes into account and handles this coupling.

Grateful to the colleagues

It is important for Professor Kristin Y. Pettersen to share the credit with her colleagues at the Department of Engineering Cybernetics and the Center for Autonomous Marine Operations and Systems (NTNU AMOS). - This would not have been possible without the strong academic group and high-qualitive support from both the administrative and technical staff. It is a fantastic workplace with incredibly talented colleagues who I greatly appreciate both as professionals and people, she says and points in particular to Professor Jan Tommy Gravdahl. - He is a close and good colleague who has been absolutely central in the development of this project, she says.

Head of Department Morten Breivik says that everyone at the department is proud and happy on Kristin's behalf.

- She is the first at the department and she is the first at the faculty. This testifies to a world-class researcher. We look forward to hosting such a project.

- The CRÈME project is researchwise very ambitious and we look forward to seeing the results that will come out of it, which in good cybernetic tradition will hopefully also benefit several areas of use, says Breivik.

Summary:

• We will develop a new control-theoretical framework that enables autonomous control of complex robot systems with strong coupling of kinematics and dynamics, says Pettersen.

Are you one of those who understood this and was inspired: Both PhD students and Post docs will be employed in the project.