MARTA FERRAZ, AUTOMATION & ROBOTICS – EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY

Marta Ferraz will be joining Keynotion at the upcoming 2nd Annual Robotics & Artificial Intelligence Summit to discuss ‘Direct Human-Robot Space Exploration; The Catalyst For Human Evolution’

Introduction

Marta Ferraz is a futurist scientist, who many scholars regard as a polymath due to her contributions to a variety of scientific fields and unconventional interpretations of reality. Marta is currently the lead scientist at the Human-Robot Interaction Lab of European Space Agency. Her main areas of interest include Evolutionary Developmental Biology, Space Life Sciences, Neuroscience, Robotics and Metaphysics. Marta describes herself as fluid and metamorphic, endowed with a strange ability to question, “who am I”. She is currently running Human-Robot Interaction studies in astronauts on board the International Space Station.

Topics

Marta will be bringing her expert knowledge to the summit to discuss the following in more detail;
• Telerobotics and Telepresence: The decay of the human biological machinery
• Adaptive Biological Robotics. Smoothing biological adaptation to space
• Cognitive Metamorphosis. The emergence of a new biological era

Publications

Recently Marta’s research has taken her to determine the type of interaction recorded between people (adults & children) under specific circumstances & with a different purpose.

‘Robot Programming Through Whole-Body Interaction’

Programmable and non-programmable educational robots are, in most cases, associated with sedentary behaviour in children. Children interact with educational robots mostly in indoor environments. Whole-body interaction and natural environments seem to potentiate children’s physical and mental health. In order to potentiate children’s physical and mental health, we have developed a new set of robotic devices – Biosymtic Robotic devices. We describe the main computational models of Biosymtic Robotic devices: a computational model demonstrating how to increase children’s physical activity levels and contact with natural environments through automatic feedback control mechanisms; a theoretical cognitive model on how to program robotic devices through whole-body interaction in natural environments. For the full paper click here

‘Biosymtic robotics: Adaptive plasticity for space exploration’

Solutions supporting human development and reproduction in space environments are critical. Developmental space biology evaluates the effects of micro and macro gravity on animals. Regarding the possibility of human development in space, results are not optimistic. We propose a new paradigm to facilitate human adaptation to off-Earth environments and develop further human evolutionary stages. We suggest that robotic devices, encouraging interactions with challenging natural environments, offering new possibilities for biological self-discovery, may potentiate human biological adaptive plasticity – facilitating adaptation to space environments. Early developmental phases may be ideal to induce space adaptation. For the full paper click here.

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