The University of Toronto had an excellent showing at ICRA 2021. Robotics Institute director Yu Sun was the program chair of this year’s conference, attended by over 5,000 people worldwide. UofT ranked 9th in accepted papers among universities, an impressive showing and the only Canadian university to make the top 20.
See a listing of all events at ICRA involving UofT researchers here, including Jessica Burgner-Kahrs’ keynote speech “I, Continuum Robot” and Animesh Garg’s participation in the CESAR (Committee to Explore Synergies in Automation and Robotics) plenary session.
David Yoon won the best student paper award for his work on “Unsupervised Learning of Lidar Features for Use in a Probabalistic Trajectory Estimator,” along with co-authors Zhang, Gridseth, Thomas, and Barfoot. You can watch his presentation here.
Robotics Institute faculty Jonathan Kelly and Florian Shkurti helped organize a robust Robotics Debate event, where participants were asked to agree or disagree with the statements: “Individual success metrics prevalent in robotics create perverse incentives that harm the long term needs of the field” and “The development of high-stakes autonomous systems warrants taking significant risks with real-world deployment to accelerate progress.”
On the final day of the conference, Robotics Institute Associate Directors Jessica Burgner-Kahrs and Hallie Siegel gave a presentation on the white paper “Making Sense of the Robotized Pandemic Response” as part of the workshop “Impact of COVID-19 on Medical Robotics and Wearables Research”
Congrats to everyone on a successful conference!