U of T Robotics News

Kings College in the Snow

We Had BIG News In 2021!

December 15, 2021

We had BIG news in 2021, and we had LOTS of news in 2021! Check out our end-of-year newsletter here.

HeRo NSERC CRSNG

HeRo Course Alert: Intro to Healthcare Robotics, Winter 2022

December 14, 2021

As part of the HeRo/CREATE graduate training program from NSERC, next term Professor Yu Sun is coordinating Introduction to Healthcare Robotics (MIE1080). Part of the program for HeRo trainees, this unique course is open to all students at the university.

Groundbreakers

Groundbreakers Series: Meet U of T’s research heroes who are solving the world’s grand challenges

November 29, 2021

Meet the people behind the research transforming our world in the Groundbreakers video series that dropped today – Nov. 29.  Check out the YouTube premiere event and hear a special […]

NSERC Synergy Award celebrates decades of collaboration on nanoscale electron microscopy and robotics

November 22, 2021

A long-standing collaboration between researchers at U of T Engineering and Hitachi High-Tech Canada (HTC) has been recognized with a Synergy Award for Innovation from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

UofT RI’s Raquel Urtasun on Toronto Life’s THE INFLUENTIALS 2021 List

November 22, 2021

Congratulations to UofT Robotics Institute’s Raquel Urtasun, AI & self-driving pioneer, who is No 14 on Toronto Life’s 2021 list of 50 INFLUENTIALS for launching Waabi with $100 million in capital—among the most ever raised by a Canadian tech start-up! 

Diversity In Medical Robotics

2021 ISMR Workshop: Diversity in Medical Robotics

November 17, 2021

The Workshop on Diversity in Medical Robotics brings together experts from academia, industry, and clinical practice for a one-day event. The goal of this workshop is to highlight the contributions of women and underrepresented individuals to the field of medical robotics and inspire the next generation of medical roboticists.

Tim Barfoot: Where Can Machine Learning Help Robotic State Estimation? | Tartan SLAM Series

November 15, 2021

Where can machine learning help robotic state estimation? That’s the question Prof. Tim Barfoot addressed in the November 11 edition of the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute Tartan SLAM series, a […]

Eric Diller Nature Electromagnets

Non-magnetic objects induced to move by electromagnets (Nature News and Views)

October 25, 2021

Congratulations to MIE’s very own Eric Diller for this recent publication in Nature! A set of electromagnets has been used to move metal objects without touching them, even though the objects are not magnetic. This method could potentially be used like a ‘tractor beam’ to move hazardous objects in space.

Florian Shkurti

Robots in the wild: U of T’s Florian Shkurti on overcoming ‘edge cases’ in machine learning

October 15, 2021

The technology behind self-driving cars has been racing ahead – and as long as they are cruising along familiar streets, seeing familiar sights, they do very well. But the University of Toronto’s Florian Shkurti says that when driverless vehicles encounter something unexpected, all that progress can come screeching to a halt.

ICCV 2021 Everingham Prize Award

Raquel Urtasun awarded Everingham Prize at ICCV21

October 13, 2021

The Everingham prize is awarded to a researcher, or a team of researchers, who have made a selfless contribution of significant benefit to other members of the computer vision community. Raquel Urtasun and her and her colleagues Andreas Geiger, Philip Lenz, Christoph Stiller were awarded the prize thanks to their work on the KITTI Vision Benchmark Suite.

Women in Robotics You Need to Know About 2021

It’s Ada Lovelace Day: Let’s celebrate UofT’s women in robotics

October 12, 2021

Congrats to Prof. Jessica Burgner-Kahrs who was named to Robohub’s annual list “Women in robotics you need to know about”. The annual list comes out every year in commemoration of Ada Lovelace Day, and in the past has featured UofT Professors Angela Schoellig, Raquel Urtasun, Sheila McIlraith, and Sanja Fidler.

Jessica Burgner-Kahrs gives a keynote at ICRA 2021

Watch Jessica Burgner-Kahrs’ 2021 ICRA Keynote

October 12, 2021

ICRA 2021 videos are now available. Watch Jessica Burgner-Kahrs’ keynote below!

Coming 08.11.21: Retail & Manufacturing Robotics Workshop

October 5, 2021

Join the UofT Robotics community on November 8th for a one-day virtual symposium with members from across Canada’s automation ecosystem, from manufacturing to e-commerce.

In this highly-focused, single-track workshop, you’ll discover the cutting edge of AI robotics, discuss common challenges, and strategize with researchers and industry partners as we close the gap between shop floor reality and practical robot and data platforms in retail and manufacturing applications.

Canadian Business: Raquel Urtasun is Bringing Transparency to Self-Driving Technology

Bringing transparency to self-driving technology

October 5, 2021

In an interview in Canadian Business magazine, Prof. Raquel Urtasun talks about how she got into autonomous vehicles research, why transparency is important in self-driving technology, and what it’s like […]

Press Coverage of Prof Animesh Garg’s Thoughts About Tesla’s Optimus Robot

October 4, 2021

Robotics Institute Prof Animesh Garg wrote a piece on the new Tesla Bot in his newsletter that was quoted/covered in IEEE Spectrum, Verge, Yahoo Finance, & Nautilus.

Visual Teach and Repeat 3 navigation framework: Now open source!

September 28, 2021

Visual Teach and Repeat (VT&R) is a navigation system for mobile robots developed and maintained by Timothy Barfoot and his team at the Autonomous Space Robotics Lab (ASRL) at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS). The Visual Teach and Repeat 3 (VT&R3) package, which is the C++ implementation of the Visual Teach and Repeat system for robot navigation with a camera or LiDAR sensor, is now available on github.

IROS Keynote: Can we build a long-term navigation system based on vision?

September 28, 2021

Watch Tim Barfoot’s keynote on vision-based navigation at the 2021 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

New article in Science Robotics: Humanoid robots that behave with less authority are more persuasive

September 23, 2021

In the future, socially interactive robots could help seniors age in place or assist residents of long-term care facilities with their activities of daily living. But will people actually accept advice or instructions from a robot? A new study published in Science Robotics suggests that the answer hinges on how that robot behaves.

09.27.2021: IROS Workshop on safe real-world robot autonomy

September 8, 2021

Join UofT Robotics at this 2021 IROS workshop that will foster long-term, interdisciplinary exchange on the development of safe real-world robotic systems.

Coming up 09.16.2021: Robotics grad networking event

September 8, 2021

Interested in a career in robotics? Join the Robotics Graduate Engineering Networking Event on Thursday, September 16th from 5-7pm.

Groundbreakers: U of T initiative brings together experts to address major societal issues

September 3, 2021

Part of U of T’s Institutional Strategic Initiatives (ISI) program, the Robotics Institute brings together top experts in different fields – from hardware design to public policy – to solve thorny, robotics-related problems in applications ranging from health care and transportation to manufacturing and logistics.

Apple Machine Learning Research: Self-Supervised Learning of Lidar Segmentation for Autonomous Indoor Navigation

September 1, 2021

We present a self-supervised learning approach for the semantic segmentation of lidar frames. Our method is used to train a deep point cloud segmentation architecture without any human annotation.

RoboWorm

RoboWorm: Light-controlled organism offers a new strategy for micro-scale robotics

July 28, 2021

In this photomicrograph, points of patterned laser light (blue) are being projected on computationally selected positions to activate the muscles of a genetically modified, one-millimetre-long C. elegans worm. The technique could offer a new way of developing organism-based microrobots for a variety of different applications.

Animesh Garg featured on Soft Robotics Podcast

Animesh Garg featured on the Soft Robotics Podcast

July 20, 2021

Want to learn more about the grand challenges of generalizable autonomy in robotics? Check out this episode of the Soft Robotics Podcast, hosted by Marwa ElDiwiny.