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

Outline of this Newsletter

Newsletter March 2009

Dear Committee Members,

In this newsletter:

  1. Welcome to Dr. Esra Kadioglu Urtis from TOBB University of Economics and Technology in Ankara (Turkey), the 100th member of our committee!
  2. Upcoming events of interest:
    • IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2009: May 12-17 in Kobe, Japan.
    • ICRA 2009 workshops and tutorials:
      • Safe navigation in open and dynamic environments: Application to autonomous vehicles (info).
      • Formal methods in Robotics and Automation (info).
      • Stochastic Kinematics Tutorial (info).
      • Humanoid Motion Planning in Real World (info).
      • Control issues in the micro/nano-world (info).
      • Open Source Software in Robotics (info).
    • 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.
    • RSS 2009 workshop:
      • Workshop on Algorithmic Automation (info]).
  3. Upcoming deadlines:
    • Int. Symp. on Combinatorial Search 2009 (SoCS) 2009: July 8-10, 2009 in the Los Angeles area (before IJCAI) Technical Paper Submission Deadline: April 4, 2009.
    • Int. Symp. on Robotics Research (ISRR) 2009: August 31-September 3 in Lucerne, Switzerland. Deadline extended: April 15, 2009.
  4. The Thesis Archive of our Technical Committee now features 28 theses (4 additions in 2008). We encourage you to check out the latest additions and to add your own thesis.
  5. Winter School on Medical Robotics and Computer-Integrated Interventional Systems (January 12-16, 2009 at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore Maryland, USA)
The NSF Engineering Research Center for Computer-integrated Surgical Systems and Technology (CISST ERC) was proud to present a week-long Winter School on Medical Robotics and Computer-Integrated Interventional Systems. During this week-long program, 19 internationally recognized faculty and 38 students from around the world participated in an intensive short course that provided an introduction to the basic technology, systems, and research themes in the emerging field of medical robotics and computer-integrated interventional systems.
The first day of the course was combined with the 10-year anniversary celebration event for the CISST ERC, and included research overviews, laboratory demonstrations, and invited lectures from Dr. Edward Miller, the Dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Dr. Jonathan Lewin, the Chairman of the Johns Hopkins Radiology Department, and Dr. Gary Guthart, President of Intuitive Surgical, Inc., as well as an industry/clinician panel.
The major themes covered were:
  1. Surgical CAD/CAM,
  2. Interactive Surgery and Surgical Assistant Systems,
  3. Surgery for Engineers,
and a theme called "Practicalities" focusing on the unusual constraints that surround research in medical robotics. It featured a topic of interest for our committee, namely navigation. More information can be found at CISST ERC