Which ICRA workshops are UofT Robotics faculty most looking forward to this year? Check out our recommendations to the 2021 edition of the premiere international conference in robotics.
Steve Waslander recommends: Perception and Action in Dynamic Environments
Humans and animals have an innate capacity to make predictions about their surroundings, which allows them to react to both static and dynamic obstacles during an action. Thanks to this ability, for example, a seagull can catch a fast-moving fish in a short amount of time. In contrast, artificial agents struggle to interact with complex and dynamic environments and often rely either on the assumption that the world is static or on simplified motion models of their surroundings. This workshop will bring together researchers coming from different backgrounds (computer vision, machine learning, and robotics) and applications, to discuss existing solutions, research problems, and the way forward to make robots interact with a permanently moving world. Besides the usual mix of invited talks and poster presentations, we will organize the DodgeDrones challenge, where participants will need to develop perception and control algorithms to navigate a drone in a highly dynamic environment.
Speakers include our own Raquel Urtasun, in addition to Chelsea Finn (Stanford), Annie Xie (Stanford), Richard Newcombe (Facebook Reality Labs), Hayk Martiros (Skydio Autonomy), Katherine J. Kuchenbecker (MPI for Intelligent Systems), Alexsandra Faust (Google Brain), and Wolfram Burgard (U of Freiburg ad TRI).
Jessica Burgner-Kahrs recommends: Parallel robots or not parallel robots? New frontiers of parallel robotics
During the last 30 years, rigid-link fixed-base parallel robots have been studied in depth, thus leading to a large quantity of research results that helped their development for many applications (e.g. pick-and-place manipulation, machine-tools, simulators, etc). Several scientific issues on these robots were solved, thus leading to a decrease in their scientific interest. In the last years, new types of parallel robotic devices appeared, like soft/continuum robots, flying robots, cable-driven robots, underactuated robots, multi-finger hands, etc. These innovative closed-chain mechanisms, with no rigid links or no fixed base or no traditional end-effector, brought several new scientific issues to be solved related to design, modelling and control. Most scientific problems are unsolved, and prevent these new robots to pass from academia to industry or society.
In addition to Jessica Burgner-Kahrs, other speakers include C. Della Santina (Technical University Delft), G. Hao (University College Cork), J.B. Izard, (Tecnalia), D. Lau (Chinese University of Hong Kong), G. Loianno (NYU), P. Renaud, (INSA Strasbourg), and C. Rucker (University of Tennessee).
Jonathan Kelly recommends: Workshop on Visual-Inertial Navigation Systems
As cameras and IMUs are becoming ubiquitous, visual-inertial navigation systems (VINS) that provide high-precision 3D motion estimation, hold great potentials in a wide range of applications from augmented reality (AR) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to autonomous driving, in part because of the complementary sensing capabilities and the decreasing costs and size of these sensors. While visual-inertial navigation, alongside with SLAM, has witnessed tremendous progress in the past decade, yet certain critical aspects in the design of visual-inertial systems remain poorly explored, greatly hindering the widespread deployment of these systems in practice. For example, many VINS algorithms are yet not robust to high dynamics and poor lighting conditions; they are yet not accurate enough for long-term, large-scale operations, in particular, in life-critical scenarios; and yet they are unable to provide semantic and cognitive understandings to support high-level decision making. This workshop brings together researchers in robotics, computer vision and AI, from both academia and industry, to share their insights and thoughts on the R&D of VINS. The goal of this workshop is to bring forward the latest breakthroughs and cutting-edge research on visual-inertial navigation and beyond, to open discussions about technical challenges and future research directions for the community, and to identify new applications of this emerging technology.
In addition to Jonathan Kelly, speakers include Luca Carlone (MIT), Maurice Fallon (Oxford University), Stefan Leutenegger (TU Munich / Imperial College London), Giuseppe Loianno (NYU), Paul Huang / Patrick Geneva (University of Delaware), Ping Tan (Alibaba), Chao Guo, (Google), Kejian Wu (NReal), and Abraham Bachrach / Hayk Martiros (Skydio)
Tim Barfoot recommends: Robust Perception For Autonomous Field Robots in Challenging Environments
Autonomous mobile robots need to operate in a diverse range of environments that present large challenges for the current state of the art in perception. For example, autonomous road vehicles need to operate in darkness and fog and search-and-rescue robots need to operate in the presence of thick smoke. These conditions, referred to as Visually Degraded Environments (VDEs), degrade the performance of cameras and LiDAR and this degradation can easily lead to higher-level failures. Further, in many cases robots require perception in VDEs far exceeding that of humans. Autonomous road vehicles, for example, must operate in VDEs, but a perception failure could endanger human lives. If techniques for robust perception in VDEs are not developed, the usefulness of autonomous mobile robots will be severely limited. This workshop aims to highlight new developments in the field of robust perception and state estimation. We will bring together experts in the field to share their work on novel sensors, new algorithms, and full perception systems. Our goal is to bring more attention to this important area, and encourage sharing and collaboration between robust, resilient perception and a diverse range of related research areas including computer vision, robust AI, and field robotics.
In addition to Tim Barfoot, speakers include Sebastian Scherer (Carnegie Mellon University, Jeanette Bohg (Stanford University), Davide Scaramuzza (University of Zurich), Claire Tomlin (University of California, Berkeley), Larry Matthies (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory), Sanjiv Singh (Carnegie Mellon University), CJ Taylor (University of Pennsylvania), and Paul Newman (Oxford University).
Eric Diller recommends: Holistic Integration (HI) of Design, Sensing, and Intelligence in Dexterous Robotic Systems
Recently, we have seen increasing efforts aimed at implementing DMRS to push the frontiers of medical interventions. Additionally, the field of medical robotics has significantly grown over the past few decades toward enabling the use of highly intelligent and autonomous systems in various medical procedures. However, the deployment and integration of DMRS have been hampered by issues such as limited sensory perception, safety concerns, and the trade-off between power and dexterity. This calls for a holistic integrated discussion taking into account (A) advanced sensing algorithms and robot perception, (B) control architectures and machine intelligence, and (C) novel designs and fabrication. Such a conversation will shed light on interlinked issues that need to be considered for a translational solution. This workshop will bring together leading researchers, clinicians, and industrial engineers of different backgrounds and provide an opportunity to discuss the applications and needs for the Holistic Integration (HI) of design, sensing, and intelligence in DMRS systems. The goal of this workshop is to broadly engage the medical robotics community, leverage the momentum of the existing community by obtaining different perspectives on the concept of HI in DMRS and define the roadmap for future enhancements.
Speakers include Russ Taylor (Johns Hopkins), Nabil Simaan (Vanderbilt), Pierre Dupont (Harvard), Robert Webster (Vanderbilt), Christos Bergeles (King’s College London),Mahdi Tavakoli (U of Alberta), Sarthak Misra (University of Twente), Iulian Iordachita (Johns Hopkins), Emad Boctor (Johns Hopkins), Kwok Wai Samuel Au (Chinese University of Hong Kong), and Elena De Momi (Politecnico di Milano).
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The IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) is an annual academic conference covering advances in robotics and is one of the premier conferences in the field of robotics. This year UofT had 32 papers accepted to the conference, and the Program Chair is UofT Institute Robotics Director, Yu Sun.
ICRA 2021 is coming up May 30-June 5. If you’d like to join one of these or ICRA’s many other sessions, click here to register.