IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Algorithms for Planning and Control of Robot Motion

Outline of this Newsletter

Newsletter June 2009

Dear Committee Members,

In this newsletter:

  1. Recent events of interest:
    • IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2009: May 12-17 in Kobe, Japan.
      • Best Conference Paper: Slawomir Grzonka, Giorgio Grisetti, and Wolfram Burgard "Towards a Navigation System for Autonomous Indoor Flying" Abstract Recently there has been increasing research on the development of autonomous flying vehicles. Whereas most of the proposed approaches are suitable for outdoor operation, only a few techniques have been designed for indoor environments. In this paper we present a general system consisting of sensors and algorithms enabling a small sized flying vehicle to operate indoors. This is done by adapting techniques which have been successfully applied on ground robots. We released our system as open-source with the intention to provide the community with a new framework for building applications for indoor flying robots. We present a set of experiments to validate our system on an open source quadrotor.
      • (Podcast): Industrial forum, science forum, citizen's forum and plenary talks
      • (Computational Motion) from Manufacturing to Neurosciences by Dr. Jean-Paul Laumond (LAAS, France)
      • (Human-Friendly Robotics) by Prof. Oussama Khatib (Stanford University, USA)
    • Int. Workshop on Robot Motion and Control (RoMoCo) 2009: June 1-3, 2009 in Czerniejewo, Poland.
    • Robotics: Science and Systems Conference (RSS) 2009: June 28-July 1, 2009 in Seattle Washington, USA.
      • Best Conference Paper: Russ Tedrake LQR-trees: Feedback motion planning on sparse randomized trees (http://www.roboticsproceedings.org/rss05/p3.html). Feedback motion planner that combines linear quadratic regulator controllers with nonlinear feedback. The planner probabilistically covers the reachable area of the state space with a region of stability with guaranties of convergence to the goal of initial conditions capable of doing so.
      • Workshops:
        • Bridging the gap between high-level discrete representations and low-level continuous behaviors (info).
        • Good Experimental Methodology in Robotics (info).
        • Understanding the human hand for advancing robotic manipulation (info).
        • Regression in Robotics—Approaches, and Applications (info).
        • Algorithmic Automation (info).
        • Integrating Mobility and Manipulation (info).
        • Creative Manipulation: Examples using the WAM (info).
        • Aquatic Robots and Ocean Sampling (info).
        • Autonomous Flying vehicles: Fundamentals and Applications (info).
        • Protein Structure, Kinematics, and Motion Planning (info).
    • RoboCup (RoboCup) 2009: June 29-July 5, 2009 in Graz, Austria. The Stadthalle of Graz was home to the RoboCup where robotics practitioners competed in 11 soccer, rescue, and junior categories and 3 demonstration events.
  2. Upcoming events of interest:
    • IROS (IROS) 2009: The 2009 IEEE/RSJ Int'l Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. October 11-15, 2009 at St. Louis, MO, USA.
      • Workshops
        • Planning, Perception and Navigation for Intelligent Vehicles (info)
        • Tutorial: Filtering and Planning in Information Spaces (info)
  3. Upcoming deadlines:
    • Humanoids (Humanoids) 2009: IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots. December 7-10, 2009 at Paris, France.
      • Paper submission deadline: June 24th