U of T Robotics News
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.
Tim Barfoot: Where Can Machine Learning Help Robotic State Estimation? | Tartan SLAM Series
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 […]
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.
Visual Teach and Repeat 3 navigation framework: Now open source!
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?
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
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
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.
Binbin Ying and Xinyu Liu win Materials Horizons Outstanding Article Award
Congratulations to Binbin Ying and Prof. Xinyu Liu for receiving the Materials Horizons Outstanding Article 2020 award. Binbin was a visiting PhD candidate at the University of Toronto, where he helped to develop stretchy, skin-like sensors that could help lead to advances in wearables, personal healthcare and soft robotics.
Animesh Garg and collaborators win Best Student Paper Award at RSS’21
UofT Robotics faculty had five papers accepted at Robotics Science and Systems this year, including one best student paper award! Congrats to Animesh Garg and co-authors for their winning paper! See all the robotics papers and talks from UofT below.
Anas Mahmoud and Juan Carrillo receive Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship
UofT Robotics PhDs Anas Mahmoud (above left) and Juan Carrillo (above right) have been awarded the 2021 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (North America Program) for their proposal on sensor fusion for 3D object detection.
WinTOR: New partnership will train self-driving cars to handle tough winter conditions
Professor Steven Waslander and his collaborators are leading a new project that will transform Toronto into a global hub for research and development related to autonomous driving in winter.
Meet Daeho Kim, UofT Robotics’ newest faculty affiliate
This July Daeho Kim joined the Department of Civil & Mineral Engineering as an assistant professor of civil engineering (Construction), with a focus on co-robotic construction and architectural engineering.