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Overview

What is contact and why is it important?

During physical interaction, humans regularly avoid, establish, and break contact with inanimate objects as well as other humans and animals; oftentimes without explicit deliberation. Contact awareness, i.e., the ability to exploit and reason about contact and perform stable manipulation, is key for the adoption of robots in a wide variety of application areas ranging from assistive robotics to flexible manufacturing. 

What research areas are we looking to address?

Progress has been made on multiple fronts, namely (a) model-based optimization approaches for planning and control through contact, (b) data-driven and reinforcement learning-based approaches for grasping and manipulation planning, and (c) development of a variety of “artificial skin” or distributed contact sensing approaches. Despite these, state-of-the-art robotic systems lag behind humans in contact awareness, limiting their use in applications such as caregiving.

What is the purpose of this workshop?

The purpose of this workshop is to stimulate and understand contact awareness from a mathematical as well as an applied standpoint. We expect this workshop to bring together voices from academia and industry to understand the current limitations of contact sensing technologies. The long term goal is to induce collaborations within the largely disparate model-based, data-driven, and distributed sensing communities. Together, we want to learn how to navigate contact dynamics in robotics.

Join us for an amazing day!