The new ICRA 2020
A highlight in the events calendar for the robotics community, including PAL Robotics, each year is ICRA 2020, which stands for The International Conference on Robotics and Automation. ICRA is the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society’s flagship conference and for the first time ever the event offers a completely new format. ICRA 2020 is a virtual conference and is being held over a three month period, from 31 May to 31 August 2020. The team at PAL Robotics are very happy to be taking part in this year’s virtual event.
ICRA is the premier international forum for robotics researchers to present and discuss their work, and the event offers an important discussion platform for robotics and automation. The conference has a long tradition in robotics and has been held every year since 1984. Previous ICRA events have been held in major cities worldwide, and recent event locations have included Montreal (2019), Brisbane (2018), Singapore (2017) and Stockholm (2016), and PAL Robotics is proud to have been to and supported all of these events.
The all-new format for ICRA 2020
In 2020, ICRA is following a new style, which aims to offer a space for sharing the latest news, ideas and research, as well as allowing for discussion, debate and collaboration – all virtually. Therefore the event has been designed with the following format, in order to allow each of these activities to take place:
Live content: 31 May to 15 june
Virtual workshops: 31 May to 30 June
Awards ceremony: 5 June
Plenary talks: 1 to 15 June
Paper discussions: 1 June to 31 August
Conference recorded material: 1 June to 31 August
RAS member events: 1 to 3 June
There are a wide range of workshops on offer at ICRA including topics as diverse as ‘Social robotics for neurodevelopmental disorders,’ ‘Opportunities and challenges in Space robotics,’ and ‘Advances in lower limb dynamic prosthesis,’ to ‘Interactive Robot Learning,’ ‘Constraint programming for mobile robotics’ and ‘Debates on the future of robotics research.’
Plenaries and keynotes that will be broadcast up until 15 June include ‘Planning in Robotics and Beyond,’ ‘Human-Centred Social Robotics’ and ‘Robot Technology for super-resilience.’
PAL Robotics at ICRA
At the originally planned live event, PAL Robotics planned to show demos of some of our humanoid robots – including TALOS, TIAGo and the latest addition to the TIAGo family, TIAGo++.
However in place of this, we are very excited to announce that on the 11th of June, at 12pm (GMT+2), you will be able to attend a live demo of our TIAGo Robot in collaboration with EU project RobMoSys that we are a partner in. Project RobMoSys focuses on developing an integrated approach built on top of the current code-centric robotic platforms, by applying model-driven methods and tools.
Our CEO, Francesco Ferro, will also be participating in a full day workshop on 23 June on ‘Real-world Deployment of Legged Robots,’ find out more about how to join the workshop at this link.
Some of our partners’ contributions
Project Memmo that we are a partner in is also organising a workshop, you can check the event programme for details of this. Memmo have recently had some research papers accepted by the University of Edinburgh.
This includes the paper titled: ‘SL1M: Sparse L1-norm Minimization for contact planning on uneven terrain’ which will be presented at ICRA 2020. The paper proposes a new contact planner for gaited locomotion.
The group will also present the following paper at ICRA 2020: ‘An Efficient and Versatile Framework for Multi-Contact Optimal Control.’ Read more on this paper here.
The Statistical Machine Learning and Motor Control Group at the University of Edinburgh is also holding a workshop at ICRA on Human-Robot handovers. More information about the group can be found here.
Serena Ivaldi who works with our TALOS robot, and is based at the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (Inria), presented a workshop on ‘Shared autonomy: learning and control. ’ You can view the session here.
Recent ICRA Events
Finally we would like to share with you a couple of our favourite videos of previous ICRA events held in Singapore and Stockholm.
More details will follow on PAL Robotics’ live demo taking place on the 11th of June, so stay tuned! Make sure you follow us on Twitter to be the first to hear the latest updates.
Lastly, save the date and e-See you at ICRA 2020! Visit our events webpage to find out more, or the official ICRA page to sign up.
If you want to keep updated on our latest news, visit our blog and our contact page for any question or curiosity you might have!