The Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC) is a not-for-profit research institute of the State University System of Florida, with locations in Pensacola and Ocala, Florida. IHMC scientists and engineers investigate a broad range of topics related to building systems aimed at amplifying and extending human cognitive, physical and perceptual capacities. [1] [2]
IHMC is focused on developing science and technology aimed at leveraging and extending human cognition, perception, locomotion, performance, and resilience. IHMC research falls under three primary areas of scientific inquiry, with collaboration among them: (1) Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning; (2) Robotics; and (3) Healthspan, Resilience & Performance. [3] Within and across these primary areas, IHMC's active research is focused on: human/machine teaming; robotics; exoskeletons; agile and distributed computing; cybersecurity; mechanisms of resilience and optimal performance; interventions to optimize health, resilience and performance; computational biology; human-machine communication & natural language understanding; intentions, beliefs & trust; knowledge discovery, data science, learning from big data; expertise studies; augmentics; and visualization & human-centered displays. [4] Robotics research includes Humanoid Robots and Avatars, Powered Exoskeltons for Paraplegic Mobility, Bipedal and quadrupedal walking, and Human-machine system design. [5]
Federal government research sponsors include the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), Army Research Laboratory (ARL), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Department of Energy (DOE), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation (NSF), Office of Naval Research (ONR) as well as other agencies and departments. In addition to government sponsored research, IHMC collaborates with numerous corporate partners. [6]
IHMC was founded by Dr. Kenneth M. Ford, Dr. Alberto Cañas, and Dr. Bruce Dunn on the campus of the University of West Florida, in 1990. IHMC was among the first interdisciplinary academic research institutions that allowed computer scientists, philosophers, and cognitive psychologists to collaborate on human centered computing projects. [7] IHMC was an early pioneer in human-centered AI, computer-mediated learning, knowledge-based systems and knowledge acquisition, natural language understanding, as well as the philosophical foundations of AI. Early IHMC researchers include Henry E. Kyburg Jr., Clark Glymour, Pat Hayes, James F. Allen, Robert Hoffman, and Joseph D. Novak. [8]
Over the years, IHMC has developed three core pillars of research: artificial intelligence, robotics, and human performance and resilience. These three research pillars continue to support the original research goal of IHMC, that being to employ science and technology to extend human capabilities. [9]
In 2004, the Florida Legislature, under the K-20 Education Code, established IHMC as an independent, statewide research institute. [10] IHMC maintains research affiliations with multiple Florida universities. [11]
In January 2010, IHMC opened a 28,000 square foot research site in Ocala, Florida, strategically located near three major university research partners as well as the central Florida technology corridor. IHMC's Ocala facilities support computer scientists, engineers, and linguists engaged in research spanning machine learning, natural language understanding, natural language understanding for social cybersecurity, and speech analysis for physiological state determination. [12] [13]
In 2010 IHMC had been recognized by the U.S. Economic Development Administration for the institute's impact on downtown Pensacola. [14]
The profile of IHMC's robotics program was enhanced by the team's participation in the DARPA Robotics Challenge which involved a series of global robotics competitions. This three-year competition pushed humanoid robotics to the realm of usability for first responders in disaster scenarios, partly motivated by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. The Virtual Robotics Challenge, the first of these challenges, saw 26 international teams work to program a virtual humanoid robot avatar to complete multiple tasks modeled after real world challenges that first responders experience. [15] The IHMC Robotics team finished first in the Virtual Robotics Challenge, putting the team among eight groups awarded an Atlas robot built by Boston Dynamics and funding to compete in the DARPA Robotics Challenge. In December 2012 the IHMC Robotics team placed second overall in phase two, the DARPA Robotics Trials, and were awarded the funding to compete in the final, three-year leg of the competition. [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] On June 8, 2015, the IHMC team earned second place in the DARPA Robotics Challenge, overcoming a series of falls on the first day of the competition that left their Atlas robot with major structural damage. [22] [23] [24]
In 2016 IHMC completed construction on the award-winning Levin Center for IHMC Research 30,000-square-foot building with expanded laboratories, research areas and offices. [25] [26]
IHMC's paraplegic mobility research team participated in the inaugural Cybathlon in 2016. The Cybathlon was the world's first international competition for cyber-assisted athletes, and like the Olympics takes place every four years. Exoskeleton pilot Mark Daniel utilized IHMC's fourth paraplegic mobility device MinaV2 to compete in Cybathlon 2016 and the Quix Mobility Platform developed for the Mobility Unlimited Challenge sponsored by the Toyota Mobility Foundation to compete in the Cybathlon 2020. [27] [28] [29]
In 2022, IHMC announced plans to build a third building on the Pensacola campus to act as a research hub for human healthspan, resilience and performance research. This effort, funded in part by a grant from Triumph Gulf Coast will help diversify and strengthen the region's economy. Triumph Gulf Coast is responsible for spending $1.5 billion in BP money in Northwest Florida. It was created in the wake of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. [30]
IHMC is home to more than 120 researchers and staff, many of whom are leading figures in their research fields. [31] Six researchers associated with IHMC have been elected as fellows at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. [32] Four people affiliated with IHMC have been inducted as fellows into the National Academy of Inventors. [33] In 2015, IHMC senior research scientist Jerry Pratt was inducted into the Florida Inventors Hall of Fame, followed in 2017 by IHMC Director Kenneth M. Ford. [34] [35]
IHMC researchers and staff occupy research facilities spread across more than 75,000 square feet of research and administrative space in downtown Pensacola and Ocala, Florida. [36]
IHMC sponsors a number of outreach efforts in the community. These include the public Evening Lecture Series, Science Saturdays, and robotics open houses and summer camps. [37]
The Evening Lecture Series hosts notable speakers and subject-matter experts. In 2011, the Evening Lecture Series was recognized by STEMflorida Inc., a not-for-profit group that promotes science, technology, engineering and math education. Past lectures are available on YouTube as a community resource. [38]
STEM-Talk is a bi-weekly podcast produced by the institute. As of March 2022, there are 132 episodes with subjects discussing a variety of topics across the breadth of science, engineering, and medicine. [39]
STEM-Talk received the 2017 & 2019 Skeptics Guide to Science & Medicine award from the People's Choice Podcast Awards, [40] and was nominated for the 2019 Science & Education Webby Award. [41]
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.
An autonomous robot is a robot that acts without recourse to human control. Historic examples include space probes. Modern examples include self-driving vacuums and cars.
The School of Computer Science (SCS) at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US is a school for computer science established in 1988. It has been consistently ranked among the best computer science programs over the decades. As of 2024 U.S. News & World Report ranks the graduate program as tied for No. 1 with Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley.
The DARPA Grand Challenge is a prize competition for American autonomous vehicles, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the most prominent research organization of the United States Department of Defense. Congress has authorized DARPA to award cash prizes to further DARPA's mission to sponsor revolutionary, high-payoff research that bridges the gap between fundamental discoveries and military use. The initial DARPA Grand Challenge in 2004 was created to spur the development of technologies needed to create the first fully autonomous ground vehicles capable of completing a substantial off-road course within a limited time. The third event, the DARPA Urban Challenge in 2007, extended the initial Challenge to autonomous operation in a mock urban environment. The 2012 DARPA Robotics Challenge, focused on autonomous emergency-maintenance robots, and new Challenges are still being conceived. The DARPA Subterranean Challenge was tasked with building robotic teams to autonomously map, navigate, and search subterranean environments. Such teams could be useful in exploring hazardous areas and in search and rescue.
Ekaterini Panagiotou Sycara is a Greek computer scientist. She is an Edward Fredkin Research Professor of Robotics in the Robotics Institute, School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University internationally known for her research in artificial intelligence, particularly in the fields of negotiation, autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. She directs the Advanced Agent-Robotics Technology Lab at Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. She also serves as academic advisor for PhD students at both Robotics Institute and Tepper School of Business.
There are a number of competitions and prizes to promote research in artificial intelligence.
Palladyne AI Corp. is an American company known for most of its existence primarily as a developer of robots. Palladyne was founded in 1983 as Sarcos Research Corporation. In 2023, Sarcos "pivoted" to become a developer of artificial-intelligence (AI) software, specifically for robotic applications. This pivot was accompanied by a cessation of all operations involving hardware. In March 2024, Sarcos changed its name to Palladyne AI.
The Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) (in English: Italian Institute of Technology) is a scientific research centre based in Genoa (Italy, EU). Its main goal is the advancement of science, in Italy and worldwide, through projects and discoveries oriented to applications and technology. Some account IIT as the best Italian scientific research centre.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to robotics:
A powered exoskeleton is a mobile machine that is wearable over all or part of the human body, providing ergonomic structural support and powered by a system of electric motors, pneumatics, levers, hydraulics or a combination of cybernetic technologies, while allowing for sufficient limb movement with increased strength and endurance. The exoskeleton is designed to provide better mechanical load tolerance, and its control system aims to sense and synchronize with the user's intended motion and relay the signal to motors which manage the gears. The exoskeleton also protects the user's shoulder, waist, back and thigh against overload, and stabilizes movements when lifting and holding heavy items.
Homayoon Kazerooni is an Iranian-born American roboticist, mechanical engineering, and professor. He serves as a professor of mechanical engineering, and the director of the Berkeley Robotics and Human Engineering Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. Kazerooni is also the co-founder of Ekso Bionics and SuitX. As a noted authority on robotics, he is frequently profiled and quoted in the media.
The DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) was a prize competition funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Held from 2012 to 2015, it aimed to develop semi-autonomous ground robots that could do "complex tasks in dangerous, degraded, human-engineered environments." The DRC followed the DARPA Grand Challenge and DARPA Urban Challenge. It began in October 2012 and was to run for about 33 months with three competitions: a Virtual Robotics Challenge (VRC) that took place in June 2013; and two live hardware challenges, the DRC Trials in December 2013 and the DRC Finals in June 2015.
Atlas is a bipedal humanoid robot primarily developed by the American robotics company Boston Dynamics with funding and oversight from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The robot was initially designed for a variety of search and rescue tasks, and was unveiled to the public on July 11, 2013. In April of 2024, the hydraulic Atlas was retired from service. A new fully electric version was announced the following day.
Cybathlon, a project of ETH Zurich, acts as a platform that challenges teams from all over the world to develop assistive technologies suitable for everyday use with and for people with disabilities. The driving force behind CYBATHLON is international competitions and events, in which teams consisting of technology developers from universities, companies or NGOs and a person with disabilities (pilot) tackle unsolved everyday tasks with their latest assistive technologies. Besides the actual competition, the Cybathlon offers a benchmarking platform to drive forward research on assistance systems for dealing with daily-life challenges, and to promote dialogue with the public for the inclusion of people with disabilities in society. The involvement of the pilot is considered essential both to the competition and in the development process, to ensure that the perspective and needs of end users are considered and addressed.
Nicolaus Adam Radford known as Nic Radford is an American engineer, roboticist, inventor, and entrepreneur raising over $250mm in funding for his companies. He is the former president and CEO of Nauticus Robotics, Inc. (NASDAQ:KITT) a robotics firm he co-founded. He also founded Jacobi Motors, his company spun out of HMI to commercialize his variable flux motor research from graduate school. He also started Rad Capital Ventures to invest in the trading of electricity. Prior to forming HMI, he spent 14 years at Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center's Dexterous Robotics Laboratory at NASA in Houston, Texas. Radford was the principal investigator tasked with leading the development of Valkyrie for participation in the 2013 DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) and NASA's future Mars robotics missions.
David Fries is an American scientist at the Institute for Human Machine Cognition, researcher, professor, entrepreneur and author in the fields of advanced robotics and ocean sensors.
Gazebo is an open-source 2D/3D robotics simulator that began development in 2002. In 2017, development forked into two versions, known as "Gazebo", the original monolithic architecture, and "Ignition", which had moved to becoming a modernized collection of loosely coupled libraries. Following a trademark obstacle in 2022 regarding their use of the name "Ignition", Open Robotics took the opportunity to switch the version names, dubbing the original fork "Gazebo Classic" and the new, modern fork "Gazebo".
Bonnie Jean Dorr is an American computer scientist specializing in natural language processing, machine translation, automatic summarization, social computing, and explainable artificial intelligence. She is a professor and director of the Natural Language Processing Research Laboratory in the Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering at the University of Florida. Gainesville, Florida She is professor emerita of computer science and linguistics and former dean at the University of Maryland, College Park, former associate director at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition,, and former president of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
Kenneth M. Ford is an American computer scientist who is the chief executive officer of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC), a research center affiliated with the State University System of Florida. He resides in Pensacola, Florida, with his wife Nancy.
Kyoungchul Kong is a South Korean mechanical engineer, entrepreneur, academic, and author. He was selected as one of the Leader Scientists from the National Research Foundation of Korea in 2023. He serves as an associate professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Angel Robotics.
