Ndivhuwo MAKONDO

Ndivhuwo MAKONDO

City of Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa
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About

A research scientist with a PhD in Computational Intelligence and Systems Science…

Activity

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Experience

  • IBM Graphic

    IBM

    City of Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa

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    City of Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa

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    Pretoria, Gauteng, South Africa

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    City of Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa

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    City of Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa

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    Johannesburg Area, South Africa

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    Johannesburg Area, South Africa

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    Pretoria Area, South Africa

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    Lwamondo, Venda, Limpopo Province, South Africa.

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    Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan

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    Pretoria Area, South Africa

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    Pretoria Area, South Africa

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    pretoria

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    Cape Town

Education

  • Tokyo Institute of Technology Graphic

    Tokyo Institute of Technology

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    Doing research on knowledge transfer between robots in hopes of finding a PhD topic, and studying the Japanese language.

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    My masters research project was focused on Modeling and Control of a Packbot510i Manipulator to perform safety inspections in the South African Gold Mines.

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    My final year research project was on developing a model predictive control (MPC) algorithm for controlling position and velocity of a DC motor.

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Licenses & Certifications

Volunteer Experience

  • The South African Institute of Electrical Engineers (SAIEE) Graphic

    Deputy Chair: Computing Chapter

    The South African Institute of Electrical Engineers (SAIEE)

    - Present 3 years 5 months

    Science and Technology

  • The South African Institute of Electrical Engineers (SAIEE) Graphic

    Guest Editor of SAIEE Africa Research Journal (ARJ)

    The South African Institute of Electrical Engineers (SAIEE)

    - Present 3 years 4 months

    Science and Technology

  • Communicate with Japanese kids in English

    Recovery Assistance Center

    - 2 months

    Children

    This is the Recovery Assistance Center of Miyagi, which keeps committing on the relief works with Miyagi prefecture and Sendai city. One of the projects, “International English Camp” is designed to care the mental health for the children.
    A lot of children got a scar in their hearts through the Great East Japan Earthquake in March 2011. Some children lost their family members or their friends, some lost their house to live, and some just could not forget what they experienced on the horrific…

    This is the Recovery Assistance Center of Miyagi, which keeps committing on the relief works with Miyagi prefecture and Sendai city. One of the projects, “International English Camp” is designed to care the mental health for the children.
    A lot of children got a scar in their hearts through the Great East Japan Earthquake in March 2011. Some children lost their family members or their friends, some lost their house to live, and some just could not forget what they experienced on the horrific day…The project has started in inviting the children who still lived in the temporary housings to Zao, a tourist spot in Miyagi in summer 2012. In spring 2013, we have started to hold the camps in Chichibu, Saitama for the children evacuated from the three prefectures affected by the disaster.
    This camp is designed for the cheerful, positive, and communicative foreign students, foreigners and the children to spend time together so that the children will get back their smiles and cheerfulness, increasing their cooperativeness, activeness, independence, and the sense of internationalism.
    They have been committed to invite all the children who have been affected by the disaster at least once.

Publications

  • Towards improving incremental learning of manipulator kinematics with inter-robot knowledge transfer

    SAUPEC/ROBMECH/PRASA

    This paper investigates the improvement of learning sensorimotor models for developmental robots, in particular robot arm kinematics models, with inter-robot knowledge transfer. Developmental robots progressively learn through embodied interaction with the physical environment. In the single-robot case, exploration in the world is performed in isolation and the robot explores its own capabilities. In a multi-robot case, with one or more experienced robots, we argue that it may be beneficial for…

    This paper investigates the improvement of learning sensorimotor models for developmental robots, in particular robot arm kinematics models, with inter-robot knowledge transfer. Developmental robots progressively learn through embodied interaction with the physical environment. In the single-robot case, exploration in the world is performed in isolation and the robot explores its own capabilities. In a multi-robot case, with one or more experienced robots, we argue that it may be beneficial for the robots to be able to share the knowledge they have acquired through their individual exploration. We explore knowledge transfer in the context of learning arm kinematics models, where an experienced robot shares its kinematic data with a new robot that is autonomously exploring its environment. We show that the sensorimotor models of the new robot can be bootstrapped by the shared knowledge, converge faster and also achieve a better asymptotic performance compared to individual exploration from scratch. We perform an analysis of knowledge transfer in simulation, ranging from simple two-link planar robots to redundant systems.

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  • Accelerating model learning with inter-robot knowledge transfer

    2018 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)

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  • A Non-linear Manifold Alignment Approach to Robot Learning from Demonstrations

    Journal of Robotics and Mechatronics (JRM)

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  • Trajectory Learning from Human Demonstrations via Manifold Mapping

    2016 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)

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  • Knowledge Transfer for Learning Robot Models via Local Procrustes Analysis

    15th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots

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  • A Geometric Inverse Kinematics Solution for a 5 DoF Redundant Manipulator

    5th IEEE ROBMECH South Africa

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Honors & Awards

  • Google Travel Grant Asia

    Google Inc

    A grant to attend any prestigious conference in topics related to Google's interests in which I am presenting a paper.

  • Dean's merit list 2008

    University of Cape Town

  • Golden Key International Honour Award

    Golden Key International Honour Society

  • Dean's merit list 2007.

    University of Cape Town

  • Best student in Technika Electrical

    Thohoyandou Technical High School

Languages

  • Japanese

    Elementary proficiency

  • English

    Full professional proficiency

  • Venda

    Native or bilingual proficiency

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