Alberto José Bugarín Diz

Application of Fuzzy Techniques to Autonomous Robots

The application of fuzzy techniques in robotics has become widespread in the last years and in different fields of robotics, such as behavior design, coordination of behavior, perception, localization, etc. The significance of the contributions was high until the end of the 1990s, where the main aim in robotics was the implementation of basic behaviors. In the last years, the focus in robotics moved to building robots that operate autonomously in real environments; the actual impact of fuzzy techniques in the robotics community is not as deep as it was in the early stages of robotics or as it is in other application areas (e. g., medicine, processes industry …). In spite of this, new emerging areas in robotics such as human–robot interaction, or well-established ones, such as perception, are good examples of new potential realms of applications where (hybridized) fuzzy approaches will surely be capable of exhibiting their capacity to deal with such complex and dynamic scenarios.

Fuzzy Systems at the University of Santiago de Compostela: A Personal Vision of the Last Twenty Years

I suppose I should say I am at a midpoint between the newcomers and the oldest in this community, since my starting point in this field is dated (approximately) halfway between now and the seminal paper by Prof. Zadeh. [14] Almost exactly twenty years have passed between the kind invitation of the editors of this volume and my attendance to the First FUZZ-IEEE Conference at San Diego for presenting my first complete paper in this area. [4] Since round numbers as twenty have the curious property of making us stop and thinking on things, I find it a good personal coincidence for writing on our path in the field of fuzzy systems, my current vision and expectations on the topic. It is true since a number of years until now that most of we researchers are worried about publishing our work in meetings and journals that are well ranked according to citation indexes. Benefits of having objective indicators on the quality of publications is out of discussion, but sometimes has the collateral effect of mostly focusing our dedication on obtaining a quantitative “return of investment” in terms of h-index or JCR well-positioned papers. This is not bad, of course, but it has the associated risk of not considering the relevance and interest of proposals like the one by the editors of this volume, that has an indubitable and non-negligible qualitative value: helping to build, reinforce and keep united our research community. Let me firstly thank them for the initiative (and for the undeserved honor of letting me share here these reflections). One of the consequences of this is what a find one of the key values of our community: its capability to provide a warm welcome to newcomers and to allow joining new researchers with new ideas and visions. Our own experience is a good example of this, or at least it is that way how we perceive it was our (modest) arrival to the research on fuzzy systems and to the fuzzy systems community.