COVID-19 Update

Unfortunately we will not be holding this workshop at ICRA 2020 due to COVID-19. We hope to re-organize this workshop in the future and will update this website if and when it occurs. We apologize for the inconvenience.

We're currently communicating with the ICRA organizers to determine the status of the workshop. As soon as possible, we will update this website with the new workshop location, format, and submission deadline.

ICRA 2020 Workshop

Representing and reasoning about unexpected situations is important in designing reliable robotic systems. Traditional approaches include mechanical systems that are naturally robust to uncertainty, explicitly reasoning about a range of possible circumstances during planning, and mitigating disturbances via accurate sensing and feedback control. Contact rich interactions add some additional challenges, including underactuated frictional interactions and hybrid mode switches. While friction adds a constant degree of uncertainty, hybrid-mode switches can either amplify or reduce the undesired effects of uncertainty. 

The central questions of this workshop are: What is the role of uncertainty in contact? How should we represent it? Should we reason about it? And how? Currently, uncertainty in contact interactions is usually mapped to variability in shape, poses, or forces; however,  it is not clear that these representations describe all sources of error. Moreover, there is no clear consensus on the trade-offs between different approaches for coping with unplanned effects. To address some of these questions, this workshop will include discussions on: explicit versus implicit representations, trade-offs between model-based and data-driven approaches, and the role of mechanical design and robust open-loop planning. 

This workshop will host talks by invited speakers, peer-reviewed poster sessions, panel discussions, and open discussions. We expect insightful discussions between experts in contact-rich interaction, leading to meaningful conclusions on the role of uncertainty in these problems. 

Call for Contributions: Videos and Demos

This workshop will accept demonstrations and videos to showcase the importance of uncertainty in robotics. Our goal is to raise awarness on both the effect of uncertainty in real systems and the recent research develope to handle this uncertainty. Speakers, poster presenters and audience are welcome to submit any videos until the workshop day. Similarly, we also encourage the submission of any demos that can be perfomed in the workshop room. 

Call for Contributions: Posters

• submission deadline: TBD, 2020
• notification: TBD, 2020
• camera ready: TBD, 2020
• workshop: TBD, 2020

Abstracts should be submitted by email to: uncertainty.at.ICRA@gmail.com

(Awesome) Speaker Lineup

• Mehmet Dogar (Leeds)
   

• Michael Posa (UPenn)
   

• Sergey Levine (Berkeley)
   

• Aaron Dollar (Yale)
   

• Aude Billard (EPFL)
   

• Wei Wei Wan (Osaka University)
   

• Jeannette Bohg (Stanford)
   

• Hanna Stuart (Berkeley)
   

Tentative Schedule for TBD

Organizers

• Bernardo Aceituno (MIT)
• Maria Bauza (MIT)
• Neel Doshi (MIT)
• Prof. Alberto Rodriguez (MIT)