ICRA 2015 Showcases Georgia Tech’s Newest Robotic and Automation Work

More than 40 researchers and students from across Georgia Tech will attend a premier international robotics event next week in Seattle – the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2015). The group will contribute 27 papers and 2 posters about advances in robotic grasping, joints and skins, manipulating vehicles underwater or on the road, visual perception, sensimotor learning, and more.

“I expect that human robot coordination will be a prominent theme this year,” says Heni Ben Amor, research scientist in the School of Interactive Computing. “There have been new developments in the past year that now allow close interaction between humans and robots when previously it was not safe to stand in their way. Also, hardware has caught up with theoretical development and new advancements in grasping are a sub-area within this topic.”

Georgia Tech’s Henrik Christensen, KUKA Chair and Distinguished Professor in theSchool of Interactive Computing and Executive Director of the Institute for Robotics & Intelligent Machines, will co-chair a session about robotic grasping. New research from Georgia Tech is helping robots grab parts of an object that cannot be not seen (“Exploiting Symmetries and Extrusions for Grasping Household Objects” by Ana Huamán Quispe, Benoît Milville, Marco Gutiérrez, Can Erdogan, Henrik Christensen, Heni Ben Amor, and Mike Stilman). This improves upon previous methods that limited what a robot could do based upon what it was already programmed to recognize.

In all, 14 papers from the College of Computing have been accepted and represent work by Ben Amor, Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee, Aaron Bobick, Byron Boots, Luca Carlone, Siddarth Choudhary, Christensen, Frank Dellaert, Jing Dong, Erdogan, Sehoon Ha, Huamán Quispe, Vadim Indelman, Charles Isbell, Martin Levihn, James Rehg, Jonathan Scholz, Stilman (dec.),and Nam Vo.

Related to grasping, Georgia Tech students will compete in the first ever “Amazon Picking Challenge” at ICRA 2015 to test how well Crichton the robot can pick objects off warehouse shelves. Led by PhD student Eric Huang, the team has been working long hours to ensure that Crichton performs well. Amazon is interested in new forms of commercially viable automated picking so it can continue to quickly package and ship items from a network of fulfillment centers all over the globe.

The conference takes place May 26-30 at The Washington State Convention and Trade Center. 

Georgia Tech’s Institute for Robotics & Intelligent Machines will host an evening reception for personnel and special guests on May 28. Faculty members from the College of Engineering also take leadership roles in chairing sessions, presenting and serving on the conference Steering Committee.