UC San Diego Researchers to Participate in IROS

Researchers at the University of California San Diego have a variety of papers and workshop presentations at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) scheduled from September 24^th to 28^th in Vancouver, Canada.

Their presentations and papers will deal with topics ranging from self-folding robots to robotic endoscopes, to better methods for object detection and computer vision. Additionally, UC San Diego Researchers are organizing workshops on a variety of themes during the event.

IROS is one of the premier conferences in robotics. It is essential for our institute that we present key papers across manufacturing, materials, healthcare and autonomy. I am very pleased to see that we have a strong showing at this flagship conference.

Henrik Christensen, Director of the Contextual Robotics Institute and Professor, Computer Science, UC San Diego

This year, the conference focuses on “friendly people, friendly robots.” Humans and robots are becoming increasingly integrated in different application domains, according to the explanation provided by conference organizers on the IROS 2017 website. “We work together in factories, hospitals and households, and share the road,” organizers said. “This collaborative partnership of humans and robots gives rise to new technological challenges and significant research opportunities in developing friendly robots that can work effectively with, for, and around people.”

Soft robotics is one way to develop robots that are not dangerous for humans and the research group of Roboticist Michael Tolley is analyzing the field with three papers at IROS 2017. Better interactions between people and robots also need enhancing computer vision and Researchers headed by Computer Scientist Laurel Riek are indeed suggesting the use of depth information to do so in one paper. Gary Cottrell, a Computer Scientist, has a paper on advancng object recognition processes. In the meantime, Electrical Engineer Michael Yip aims at developing medical robots like the Da Vinci surgical system in a much better way.

Tolley is also one of the organizers of the September 28^th workshop titled “Folding in Robotics.” Yip is one of the organizers of the September 24^th workshop titled “Continuum Robots in Medicine, Design, Integration, and Applications.” Nicholas Gravish, a Mechanical Engineer, is one of the organizers for the September 28^th “Robotics-inspired Biology” workshop.