RAS Talks are a series of seminars organized by the Robotics and Autonomous Systems Research Group in collaboration with IEEE RAS Egypt Chapter and Scientific Committee of the Student Union. The main aim is to provide a communication point for undergraduate and postgraduate students to share and learn about others research ideas in an informal manner. The talks are also widely open to all members of the German University in Cairo. So, if you've got an idea for a talk, whether it is directly related, slightly related or entirely unrelated to your research, let us know!

• Theme of talks: Informal, wide range of topics but must be related to robotics and automation. Talks to be pitched at a level that could be understood by a non-specialist. We are not looking for proofs or slides filled with equations.
• Format of talks: Can be very varied in nature, normally a 30min presentation followed by 10 to 20 minutes of question period at the end. An example talk structure is as follows:
  - First 5 min: Introduce yourself your speciality and your group.
  - Next 10 min: Talk about the background and motivation for the selected topic or your work.
  - Next 5 min: Discuss the work at a high level (e.g. Why is it important? Where does it fit in to other applications?)
  - Next 5 min: Talk about the topic at a low level.
  - Final 5 min: Conclude the talk and highlight the future work.
• When: check below.
• Where: RAS Lab C6.108 (check below).
• How to register: Interested in being a speaker at the RASTalks? Contact us:
  RASTalks.guc@gmail.com
  http://www.facebook.com/RASTalks.GUC
  http://www.twitter.com/RASTalks_GUC

We hope you attend, present and enjoy the RAS Talks!

A Certificate of Recognition will be awarded by the IEEE RAS Egypt Chapter to the best 2 talks throughout each semester.

Agenda

ID	Date	Speaker
10	February 24, 2013	Eng. Marwa Magdy Shalaby
		Talk: Mobility Aids for Blind People using Smart Systems [RAS Lab C6.108]
9	February 17, 2013	Eng. Omar Mahmoud
		Talk: Hybrid Control in Coordination of Multi-Agent Autonomous Vehicles in Intersections [RAS Lab C6.108]
8	February 3, 2013	Eng. Ahmad Ali and Eng. Mohamed Yehia
		Talk: Task Allocation in Multirobot Systems [RAS Lab C6.108]
7	January 23, 2013	Eng. Ahmed Wagdy
		Talk: Group Formation in Multirobot Systems [RAS Lab C6.108]
6	Dec. 9, 2012	Dr. Alaa Khamis
		Multirobot Simulation Environments [RAS Lab C6.108]
5	Dec. 2, 2012	Mohamed Ghanem
		Talk: Metaheuristic Optimization-based Approach to Multirobot Task Allocation [RAS Lab C6.108]
4	October 21, 2012	Ramy Rashad
		V-REP: Virtual Robot Experimentation Platform [RAS Lab C6.108]
3	May 05, 2012	Eng. Amr Nagaty, University of New Brunswick, Canada
		Talk: Robot Operating System (ROS) [3rd slot in H8]
		ROS is an open souce Robot Operating System that runs under Ubuntu. ROS was developed to provide a framework that can manage the complexity of robot software development for research and industry. ROS provides drivers, functionalities and infrastructure for the operation of robotics. Also, ROS includes numerous visualization and 3D simulation tools. ROS is currently being used for robotics by: University of Pennsylvania, University of Waterloo, University of Toronto and many other universities. In this lecture, the ROS framework is presented to highlight its main capabilities. The simulation and visualization tools of ROS are presented with multiple examples and applications. For further information about ROS, access the official wiki at http://www.ros.org/wiki/. This talk has been covered by local media.
2	March 08, 2012	Eng. Asser El-Gindy, Mechatronics Graduate of Class 2011
		Talk: Multirobot Cooperation in the context of Humanitarian Demining [3rd slot in H6]
		Cooperative Multi-robot System (MRS) is a group of robots that are designed aiming to perform some collective behavior. The MRS is gaining great interest because of the following reasons: Some tasks may be quite complex for a single robot to do or even it might be impossible. Having small, simple robots will be easier and cheaper to implement than having only one single powerful robot. Increasing the system reliability because having only one robot may work as a bottleneck for the whole system especially in critical times. But when having multiple robots doing a task and one fails, others could still do the job. Effective and robust cooperation among the robots can also synergistically improve the performance of the system and can endow it with higher-level faculties, such as group formation, distributed search, dynamic task allocation, communication relaying, cooperative target detection and tracking and shared situation awareness. This seminar introduces multirobot systems and discusses the concept of cooperation in these systems. A case study about cooperative multirobot system in humanitarian demining will be represented and discussed.
1	Oct. 5, 2011	Eng. Waleed Ashraf Andul Hafiz, Mechatronics Graduate of Class 2011
		Talk: Energy Consumption Modeling and Optimization for Industrial Robots
		Industrial robots are used in several applications in production plants and thus, they consume energy which contributes to the energy bill. Energy consumption is becoming an increasingly important criterion for the competitiveness of manufacturers and so it is important to measure the energy consumption of robots as well as to find ways to optimize this energy in order to increase the efficiency of production. In this bachelor project, the industrial robot KUKA was modeled on SimMechanics. This model was used to simulate different trajectories in order to calculate the power consumption of the model. The same trajectories were also applied to the KUKA robot and power consumption of both the model and the actual robot were compared qualitatively to assess the reliability of the model. A set of trajectories were then simulated on the model and the most optimal trajectory in terms of energy consumption was found. The trajectories were analyzed to find the features characterising the optimal energy trajectory.