From Safety to Comfort in the Humanoid Coworker and Assistant

Organizers

Jim Mainprice, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Massachusetts, USA

Dmitry Berenson, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Massachusetts, USA

Dana Kulić, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Olivier Stasse, LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse, France

Motivation And Goals

The aging population in the most modern societies as well as the always increasing demand for productivity drives the need for robot coworkers and assistants. Humanoids, being especially well suited to cope with human environments, are the ideal robots for such roles.

However, integrating the necessary safety features while endowing the robots with a model of our behavioral patterns and social habits is a difficult problem. How do we make the robots’ motions safer? How do we make them more legible? How can we recognize and predict the user’s intention? How do we make robots collaborate with users in performing complex tasks seamlessly? How do we learn from observation and interaction with the user, while ensuring their safety?

This workshop intends to address these questions by bringing together researchers and engineers from different sub-fields of robotics, including but not limited to motion planning, machine learning, human-robot interaction, and perception.

Venue

www.humanoids2013.com

List Of Topics

Safe Motion Planning
Human-Aware Motion Planning
Human-Robot Interaction
Human-Robot Collaboration
Human Motion Analysis
Learning from Demonstration
Trajectory Generation

IMPORTANT DATES

20 September 2013 : Abstract submission deadline

30 September 2013 : Notification of acceptance

15 October 2013 : Workshop day

Speakers

Torsten Kroeger, Postdoc, Stanford, California, USA
Sylvain Calinon, Researcher, Italian Institute of Technology, Genova, Italy
Sami Haddadin, Lecturer TUM, DLR, Institute of Robotics, Munich, Germany
Andrea Thomaz, Associate Professor, Georgia Tech, USA
Charlie Kemp, Associate Professor, Georgia Tech, USA

Schedule

08:50 - 09:00 Introduction

09:00 - 10:00 Torsten Kroeger

10:00 - 10:15 Coffee Break

10:15 - 11:15 Sylvain Calinon

11:15 - 11:35 Poster presenter

11:35 - 13:00 Lunch Break

13:00 - 14:00 Sami Haddadin

14:00 - 15:00 Andrea Thomaz

15:00 - 15:30 Coffee Break

15:30 - 16:30 Charlie Kemp

16:30 - 16:45 Jim Mainprice

16:45 - 17:30 Discussion Panel

17:30 End

Call For Posters

We invite researchers and students to present their work in the form of poster sessions. To participate please send a maximum one page abstract at jmainprice@wpi.edu using the conference format. The deadline for abstracts is September 10th and notification of acceptance is September 30th.