Dear robotics graduate students and newcomers to robotics,

If you are what I imagine delving into robotics to be like today, the majority of your time is spent as follows:

• navigating Slack channels while tuning into some online lectures,
• trying to figure out whether you should be reading more papers, coding more, or if you are just a slow reader/coder/etc,
• and if you are a grad student, in particular, having a never-ending cycle of self-doubt questions that seem super important, such as “what is a research question anyway? And how do you find one that no one has tackled before — and not because it’s a dumb question? Oh wait… is my question dumb? Can I find out without asking my prof?”

Much of the questions I had as a grad student stemmed from my lack of knowledge about what is considered to be normal by academia, the robotics community, and more narrowly the subdomain of robotics I belonged to. The friends/colleagues/people I met along the way helped me fill that much-needed knowledge gap about the norm because many of us were on the same journey with similar struggles/questions.

As an assistant professor who spent the majority of my professorship in the COVID-19 pandemic mode, I worry that my students’ grad school journey has not offered the same kind of shared experience and camaraderie with people in the domain that I am now seeing the huge benefit of.

The upcoming IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2022 will be the first robotics conference that many of you attend in-person since the pandemic (I’m in this category). For many of you, it may be your first time attending an academic conference. For even more of you, this may be your first virtual attendance at ICRA.

ICRA is a multi-track, full-week of robotics festivity that draws in thousands. It can pass by you in a blink.

So, in a series of short blog posts (because, who has the time these days), I am going to highlight a few things in the form of a millennial’s guide to ICRA.

I’m assuming that you, the reader, may be as impatient a reader as I am, who likes information presented in a short, snappy, and organized way. The more bullet points the better.

So let’s get started.

** Full disclosure, I’m one of the two publicity co-chairs for the ICRA conference. If you want to be on the grounds of ICRA as a student science communicator, reach out to us. **

In this illustration, NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter stands on the Red Planet’s surface as NASA’s Perseverance rover (partially visible on the left) rolls away. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The difference between robotics and automation is almost nonexistent and yet has a huge difference in everything from trade shows, marketing, publications to academic conferences and journals. This week, the difference was expressed as an opportunity in the Dear Colleague Letter below from Professor Ken Goldberg, CITRIS CPAR and UC Berkeley, who suggested that students whose papers were rejected from ICRA, revise them for CASE, the Conference on Automation Science and Engineering. This opportunity was expressed beautifully in the title quote from Professor Raja Chatila, ex President of IEEE Robotics and Automation Society and current President of IEEE Global Society on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems. “One robot on Mars is robotics, ten robots on Mars is automation.”

Dear Colleagues,

Over 2000 papers were declined by ICRA today, including many that can be
effectively revised for another conference such as IEEE CASE (deadline 15
March).

IEEE CASE, the annual Conference on Automation Science and Engineering, is
a major IEEE conference that is one of three fully-supported IEEE
conferences in our field (with ICRA and IROS).

In 2021 CASE will be held 23-27 August.  It will be hybrid, with a live
component in Lyon France and an online component:
https://case2021.sciencesconf.org/

IEEE CASE was founded in 2006 so is smaller but growing quickly.  The
acceptance rate for the last CASE was about 56%, higher than ICRA 2021
(48%), IROS, or RSS.  I consider this a feature not a bug: it is an
excellent venue for exploratory and novel projects.

IEEE CASE continues the classic conference model of featuring a 10-15 min
oral presentation of each paper in contrast to poster sessions.  This is
particularly exciting for students, who get the valuable experience of
lecturing and fielding questions in front of an audience of peers.

IEEE CASE also has a tradition of spotlighting papers nominated for awards
such as Best Paper, Best Student Paper, etc.  Each nominated paper is
presented in special single session track on Day 1, where everyone at the
conference attends and there is a lively Q&A led by judges.

IEEE CASE emphasizes Automation.  Automation is very closely related to
Robotics. There is substantial overlap, but Automation emphasizes
efficiency, robustness, durability, safety, cost effectiveness. Automation
also includes topics such as optimization and applications such as
transportation and mfg. I like how RAS President Raj Chatila summed up the
relationship 10 years ago: “One robot on Mars is robotics, ten robots on
Mars is automation.”

In China there are over 100 university departments
focused on Automation.  The impact factor for the IEEE Transactions on
Automation Science and Engineering (T-ASE) this year is on par with T-RO
and higher than IJRR. Automation is important to put robotics into
practice.

Ken Goldberg

Professor, Industrial Engineering and Operations Research

William S. Floyd Jr. Distinguished Chair in Engineering, UC Berkeley

Director, CITRIS People and Robots Lab

Image: ICRA 2017

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews several companies at the International Conference for Robotics and Automation (ICRA). ICRA is the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society’s biggest conference and one of the leading international forums for robotics researchers to present their work.

Interviews:

Howard Michel, Chief Technology Officer of UBTECH Education, on a humanoid robot for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) education for a range of ages. (Begins at 1m 20s.)

Li Bingbing, Software Engineer and Cofounder of Transforma in Singapore, on a robot for painting tall buildings. (Begins at 10m 25s.)

Xianbao Chen, Associate Researcher at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, on a hexapod robot for large parts machining. (Begins at 17m 5s.)

Lester Teh Chee Onn, Environmental Engineer at Advisian, on a watercraft for environmental monitoring. (Begins at 27m.)

Links

• Download mp3 (18.8 MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS
• Support us on Patreon

The Amazon Picking Challenge is over and two things stood out. One: how many different arm gripper solutions were possible; and two: just how difficult the challenge still is. The gap between the top two teams and the other 26 teams was significant, with Team RBO scoring 148 points, Team MIT scoring 88 points and Team Grizzly next best with 35 points.

Just in: video from winning Team RBO (hattip to SushiCapacitor on Reddit)

https://youtu.be/LtWPH-bcc4M

The Amazon Picking Challenge was developed to spur advancement in fundamental technologies for automated picking in unstructured warehouse environments. This is something that Amazon badly needs to do better in order to fulfill all our e-commerce instant delivery orders. And it’s also something that will enable robots to better work in all areas of our life. Not surprisingly then, there was a lot of excitement at ICRA around the 2 day challenge.

One of the conference expo halls was given over to robot competitions. There were 16 bays with a set of warehouse shelves in each. Amazon had announced a menu of common e-commerce items that would be used in the challenge, but before each round the shelves were stocked with a randomized selection of items from the menu and each team was given a order list to fulfill. Each of the 28 teams was given time slots to practice in and then compete. Over the course of 2 days, 28 teams rotated through the competition.

It was similar to the DARPA Robotics Challenge, at least the 2013 first round. “Like watching paint dry.” With so much happening at ICRA, I was only able to visit the Picking Challenge for short periods of time. As a spectator, I spent most of my time watching robots do nothing. Large amounts of nothing. Occasionally nothing would be enlivened by an attempt to pick up nothing, or perhaps the shelf itself. Once or twice I saw a real pick… get dropped.

If I was very lucky, because the competition area was crowded with media, spectators and members of other teams, I might get to look at the laptops running code and showing representations of what the robot was perceiving while it looked like nothing was happening.

And the perception was the real event. I talked to Team MIT after they posted their score of 88 points, blowing all previous entrants out of the water. I had particularly noticed their combination of an ABB 2 armed robot with a flat scoop and a suction gripper. When asked if they attributed their success to the end effector or other mechanical solutions, the team gave all credit instead to their perception and path planning algorithms.

Ultimately that is the secret sauce that Amazon, and all the other major robot companies, would like to capture; better algorithms for existing robots. The range of hardware in use in the competition was broad. There were several Baxters, Yaskawa Motomans, Universal Arms, ABBs, PR2s, Barrett Arms, custom built 3d printer style rigs and factory automation. There were scoops, hands, grippers, and suction.

End effectors were made or covered in a range of substances, wood, metal, plastic, soft silicon. While it might all be about the algorithm, I will point out that the two most efficient teams did both use suction and soft surfaced grippers. A third thing that stood out to me was how many large robotics companies were in the audience of the Picking Challenge, watching.

Congratulations to the winning teams – and to Amazon for the support they gave the robotics community for this event. Amazon awarded travel grants to ICRA, arranged practice equipment and a $26,000 prize pool.  Participants will be encouraged to share and disseminate their approach to improve future challenge results and industrial implementations.

Some more information from Barrett Technology:

Of 25 teams from around the world, the winner of the Amazon Robotic Bin-Picking Challenge is the Technische Universität Berlin using Barrett’s WAM robotic arm.

The Amazon Picking Challenge is the centerpiece of the record-attendance IEEE Conference on Robotics & Automation in Seattle this year.  There are 28 teams here from around the globe who have brought their hardware and software to the competition.  Entries include robotic arms from ABB, Fanuc, Rethink Robotics, Universal Robots, and Yaskawa-Motoman.  The competition just finished, and the scores are in…  Technische Universität Berlin’s Robotics and Biology Laboratory using Barrett’s WAM arm in 1st place at 148 points followed, in 2nd place with 88 points, by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology using an ABB arm and a gripper with creative finger geometries.  The 3rd place finisher came in at 35 points.

Prof. Oliver Brock of TU-Berlin remarks: “This has been a fantastic team effort.  Every single member of our team contributed with enthusiasm and ingenuity, enabling us to produce a compelling showcase for mobile manipulation as a winning approach to industrial manipulation.”  Speaking to media, Townsend adds: “We are grateful that TU-Berlin won this competition, and of course especially grateful that they chose to use the WAM arm.  The WAM’s dexterity is world-class, the long-and-slender links allow the robot to reach easily in and around tight workspaces, and the WAM’s famed backdrivability enables deft interactions with the environment. While it’s a powerful combination of capabilities, the great creativity and dedication of the students and staff under Oliver’s leadership has been essential, and it has been an absolute pleasure supporting them.”

The WAM arm (shown with a BarrettHand).

To learn more about the team from the Technische Universität Berlin, go to

http://www.robotics.tu-berlin.de

Contact Prof. Alberto Rodriguez for more information about the MIT team, at

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~albertor

To read more about the 2015 Amazon Robotic Bin-Picking Challenge, go to

http://amazonpickingchallenge.org

For information on the IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation, go to

http://icra2015.org

Also presented recently at ICRA, Takahiro Kizaki and Akio Namiki from the Graduate School of Engineering at Chiba University in Japan demonstrated a system comprised of a fast vision system (500 fps) coupled with a fast robotic arm and three-fingered hand, capable of juggling two balls by tracking them in the air and adjusting accordingly. Automaton has more detail.

Evan Ackerman, writing for IEEE Spectrum’s Automaton blog, says

Researchers at MIT CSAIL have decided that slow and obstacle-free flight is boring, so they’ve come up with a way to get MAVs navigating at high speed, indoors, around obstacles, without needing motion tracking or GPS or beacons or any of that nonsense. All they need is a little aircraft that can carry a planar laser rangefinder, an IMU, and a pre-existing 3D occupancy map that the MAV can localize itself in.

This research has been conducted by the Robust Robotics Group (RRG), led by Nicholas Roy. A paper explaining it in detail was presented at ICRA by graduate student Adam Bry. A similar video using a quadrotor (below) appears on the personal page of RRG Research Scientist Stefanie Tellex, which is worth a visit for the cat video she’s also posted! (IMU = Inertial Measurement Unit)

A Voice-Commandable Robotic Helicopter…

The above video, by Erico Guizzo and Evan Ackerman of IEEE Spectrum, and shows Patrick Rowe, of RE2 (RE-squared), the firm hired by DARPA to build the standard platform for their ARM program, putting a completed unit through its paces at ICRA.

A small omni-roller suitable for use as one or more fingers of a robotic hand…

An autonomous robotic fish for detecting and finding the source of pollution…
http://youtu.be/z-XI9MrU1iM

MIT 6.141 Robotics Class Final Challenge for 2012…

Back to ICRA to watch an Adept mobile robot navigating the show floor…

Another Adept robot being used in research at Cornell…

And finally, Georgia Tech’s Travis doing a little dance…

The above video, posted to IEEE Spectrum’s YouTube channel, shows a sampling of the exhibits that were there to be seen at ICRA 2012 (May 14-18), with a few scenes taken from the robot’s point of view. Rated G for Good Fun!