Room G404, North Building. Zoom link:878 1161 8136. Code is 729689

To avoid the worst impacts of climate change, the overall emissions of greenhouse gases due to human activities must decrease at a rapid pace. This includes emissions due to robotics, whether they come from the applications unlocked by robotics technologies or from the underlying activities of the research community. While climate change is one of the most pressing issue of our time, it is seldom discussed within the Robotics and Automation Society. This workshop proposes to initiate the discussion through a mix of presentations aimed to educate on the issue and direct participant interactions to start a longer-term reflection on how robotics research and its outcomes could evolve to contribute to greenhouse gases emission decrease. This will include a general presentation of climate change, a guided computation for each participant of their individual footprint to give a more concrete example of the order of magnitudes regarding emissions, as well as data on lab and conference footprints, and a panel discussion on the possible ways to improve the footprint of robotics activities. In the spirit of CONNECT+, the theme of this year’s ICRA, the overview on climate change will be given by external climate expert and interactions between participants will be intrinsic to the workshop.

Invited speaker

Kaoru Tachiiri is a Senior Scientist and a Group Leader of Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (Earth System Model Development and Application Group, Research Center for Environmental Modeling and Application, Research Institute of Global Change). Currently he is also cross-appointed to National Institute of Environmental Studies. His expertise is climate-carbon cycle feedback (particularly transient climate response for cumulative carbon emissions (TCRE) ) and human-earth system interaction. He contributed as a contributing author in the 6th Assessment Report (AR6) of the Working Group (WG) 1 of IPCC (Chapter 5), and as an author of the cited papers he contributed to all of the WGs 1-3’s AR6s. Recently, he participated in the IPCC Workshop on scenarios (in April, 2023), and joined Advisory Group and a task force of the Scenario Model Intercomparison Project (ScenarioMIP). 

Carbon footprint session

The goal of this session is to provide the participants some orders of magnitudes around the carbon of different actions and activities

Individual footprint: the participant will be invited to compute their own carbon footprint thanks to an online calculator, while being guided by a facilitator.

Lab-level footprint: how to compute the carbon footprint computation of a laboratory through the example of the Gepetto Team at LAAS-CNRS

Conference footprint: discover in a quizz-way the different elements influencing the footprint of an ICRA-like conference

Panel

We will have a two-parts discussion, one on the impacts of robotic research activities, the other one on the impacts of robots and robotics applications.

Panelists:

• Kaspar Althoefer, Queen Mary University of London, General Chair of ICRA 2023

• Aude Billard, EPFL, President of IEEE-RAS

• Brian Plancher, Columbia University, Sustainable Machine Learning

• Ludovic Righetti, New York University, IEEE-RAS Ad Hoc Committee on Sustainability

You can submit in advance through this form one or more questions that you would like panelists to address at the workshop.

Organizers

• Adrien Escande

Inria Center of Grenoble Alpes University

https://sites.google.com/site/adrienescandehomepage/home

• Timothy Bretl

Aerospace Engineering, The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

https://aerospace.illinois.edu/directory/profile/tbretl

• Nicolas Mansard

LAAS-CNRS

https://gepettoweb.laas.fr/index.php/Members/NicolasMansard

• Ludovic Righetti

New York University

https://engineering.nyu.edu/faculty/ludovic-righetti