Navigating Contact Dynamics in Robotics
Bridging the Gap Between Modeling, Sensing, and Contact-aware Control
🏆 Top Three Workshop Papers Split a $1,500 Prize 💰
🏆 Top Three Workshop Papers Split a $1,500 Prize 💰
June 25, 2025
Los Angeles, CA, United States
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.
The best three workshop papers will be awarded a grant.
1st Prize - $750
2nd Prize - $500
3rd Prize - $250
Robot skins and tactile sensors that enable real-time feedback of physical contact
Contact modeling and simulation
Control and learning methods for large-scale and multi-contact interactions
Integration of contact sensing hardware and software for robots to complete challenging contact-rich tasks
April 9 - Applications Open
May 7 May 11 - Submission Deadline 11:59 PM AoE
May 28 June 4 - Notification of acceptance
June 11 June 15 - Camera ready deadline
June 24, 8PM - Social at Audio Graph Beer Co.
June 25 - Day of the workshop!
Confirmed Speakers
Assistant Professor
National University of Singapore (NUS)
Chief Scientist at Berkshire Grey & Professor Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University
Assistant Professor
National University of Singapore (NUS)
Assistant Professor
Carnegie Mellon University
Professor
Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST)
Associate Professor
Chalmers Institute of Technology
Spotlight Talks
Jessica Yin
Postdoctoral Researcher
Meta FAIR
Ph.D. Student
MIT
Paarth Shah
Research Scientist
Toyota Research Institute
Siddharth Rupavatharam
Senior Sensor Design Engineer
Tesla
Join us for an amazing day!