U of T Robotics News
HeRo Course Alert: Intro to Healthcare Robotics, Winter 2022
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 Series: Meet U of T’s research heroes who are solving the world’s grand challenges
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
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
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!
2021 ISMR Workshop: Diversity in Medical Robotics
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.
Non-magnetic objects induced to move by electromagnets (Nature News and Views)
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.
Robots in the wild: U of T’s Florian Shkurti on overcoming ‘edge cases’ in machine learning
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.
Raquel Urtasun awarded Everingham Prize at ICCV21
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.
It’s Ada Lovelace Day: Let’s celebrate UofT’s women in robotics
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.
Watch Jessica Burgner-Kahrs’ 2021 ICRA Keynote
ICRA 2021 videos are now available. Watch Jessica Burgner-Kahrs’ keynote below!
Coming 08.11.21: Retail & Manufacturing Robotics Workshop
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.
Bringing transparency to self-driving technology
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
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.
09.27.2021: IROS Workshop on safe real-world robot autonomy
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
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
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
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: Light-controlled organism offers a new strategy for micro-scale robotics
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 the Soft Robotics Podcast
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.