[robocup-worldwide] Call for Posters: Beyond Robot Grasping - IROS 2012 Workshop -

[Heni Ben Amor]

Call for Posters

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IROS 2012 Workshop "Beyond Robot Grasping:
Modern Approaches for Dynamic Manipulation"
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Key Facts:
IROS 2012 Workshop, October 7-12, 2012 (exact date to be specified)
Location: Vilamoura, Algarve, Portugal

Submission Deadline:  August 1st, 2012
Notification Due:     August 10th, 2012

URL: http://www.ias.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/Research/IROS2012

Organizers: Heni Ben Amor, Ashutosh Saxena, Oliver Kroemer, Jan Peters
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Objectives:

The field of robot grasping and manipulation is reaching an important
milestone. In recent years, we have seen various robots that can
reliably perform basic grasps on unknown objects in unstructured
environments. However, these robots are still far away from being
capable of human-level manipulation skills such as in-hand or bimanual
manipulations of objects, interactions with non-rigid objects, and
multi-object tasks such as stacking and tool-usage. As such advanced
manipulations involve interacting with uncertain real-world
environments, they pose major problems for current approaches and
traditional methods that depend on accurate models of the robot and its
surroundings.

This workshop focuses on how modern machine learning techniques and
sensor technologies can help robots go beyond basic grasping abilities
towards advanced manipulation skills. In recent years, innovations
from these fields have played a pivotal role in developing
state-of-the-art approaches for robot grasping under uncertainty. By
further refining and improving upon these approaches, we strive towards
creating robots that are capable of complex manipulation skills in
real-world environments.

We hope to bring together outstanding researchers and graduate students
to discuss current trends, problems, and opportunities in manipulation
research, and thereby encourage communication and common practices
among scientists in this field.

Important Dates:

 * Submission deadline: August 1st, 2012
 * Notification of acceptance: August 10th, 2012
 * Workshop: October 7-12, 2012 (the exact day will be announced soon)

Invited speakers:

 * Pieter Abbeel (University of California, Berkeley)
 * Peter Allen (Columbia University)
 * Christoph Borst (DLR - German Aerospace Center)
 * Oliver Brock (Technical University Berlin)
 * Aaron Dollar (Yale University)
 * Matt Mason (Carnegie Mellon University)
 * Erhan Oztop (Ozyegin University)
 * Robert Platt (SUNY Buffalo)
 * Anis Sahbani (Université Pierre et Marie Curie)
 * Siddhartha Srinivasa (Carnegie Mellon University)

Workshop Format:

A key goal of the workshop is to identify modern machine learning
techniques and sensor technologies that have led to recent advances in
the
field. In this manner, the current state-of-the-art can be assessed.
Given these insights, we want to discuss important next steps and open
problems in the field. Topics to be addressed include, but are not
limited to:

- What is the state-of-the-art in robot learning of manipulations?
- How can we benefit from recent results in machine learning, e.g.,
structured learning, Gaussian processes, conditional random fields,
deep
belief networks?
- How can robots make use of reinforcement learning, or other
self-improvement methods, to adapt to changing environments and tasks?
- How can robots learn to handle ambiguous sensory signals?
- How can robots model uncertainty in their surroundings and their
actions?
- Which representations can leverage the acquisition of complete
multi-modal models of the environment?
- How can robots perform bimanual actions that are synchronized?
- How can robots determine optimal actions on non-rigid objects?
- How can robots learn to robustly detect the salient events in
manipulation tasks, e.g. when objects make and break contact?
- What is the state of the art in robot hand technology?
- How much can we reliably learn from simulations?
- How can apprenticeship learning help to overcome the correspondence
problem?
- How can robots remove and place complex objects in cluttered
environments?
- How can we model finger synergies over longer action sequences?
- How can human task knowledge be efficiently transferred to robots?
- How can task-relevant features of objects be estimated?
- How can robots efficiently generalize a task from only a few human
demonstrations?
- How can a robot represent compound objects; e.g. objects stacked on
a tray or a bottle and a cap?
- How can the effects of actions be represented in a general form?
- What prior knowledge can a robot be expected to have?
- What are the key challenges and can we decide on benchmark tasks that
allow us to measure and compare progress in this field?
- Which datasets and code components can be shared, in order to allow
researchers to compare their respective methods and build upon each
other's work?

Submissions and Publication

Extended abstracts (1-2 pages) will be reviewed by the program committee
members on the basis of relevance, significance, and clarity. Accepted
contributions will be presented as posters but particularly exciting
work may be considered for talks. Submissions should be formatted
according to the conference templates and submitted via email to
beyond.grasping.iros2012 at googlemail.com


For more information, see:
http://www.ias.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/Research/IROS2012