ICRA 2024 Full-day Workshop

Agile Movements II:

Animal Behavior, Biomechanics, and Robot Devices

Date: Monday, May 13th, 2024

Location: F205, Annex Hall, PACIFICO Yokohama, Japan,

and Online (Hybrid)

May 1, 2024: Program has been updated.
Apr. 24, 2024: Speaker list has been updated.
Apr. 10, 2024: Final submission page has been opened.
Mar. 29, 2024: Poster submission deadline has been extended to April 8 (AoE).
Mar. 22, 2024: Poster awards information is updated.
Mar. 21, 2024: Fourier Intelligence joins our workshop sponsor!!
Feb. 15, 2024: The call for contributions has been published, and the submission form has opened.
Feb. 08, 2024: The workshop date has been confirmed as May 13th, 2024 (on the first day of ICRA2024).
Dec. 21, 2023: Our workshop has been accepted for ICRA2024 !!!
Sep. 19, 2023: The website has been launched.

Description

Robotic movements are becoming more agile. Although there is no unified definition of agility, agile movements have been interpreted in many ways – performing exotic motions, utilizing natural dynamics, moving across unstructured terrain, resolving survival issues, and more. Nonetheless, these agile behaviors still cannot reach those of animals, wherein biological systems outperform in many aspects – delicate body structure with passive mechanics/dynamics, complex neuromechanical motion planning and control systems, and advanced sensing capabilities like vision and haptics. Such discrepancy degenerates the robot's performance in real-world scenarios and prevents the robots from performing tasks that require quick response and overall stability. Thus, leveraging integrative biological studies of body physiology, neuroscience, and biomechanics, and robotic studies of mechanism design and manufacturing, planning and control, and lower- and higher-level kinematic and dynamic models appears to be the key to revealing the general mechanism and principle of agile movements. Specifically, this workshop wants to discuss:

Regarding the functions that grant animals agility, what elements are currently absent in existing robots?
What priorities should be set to enable robots to surpass living organisms in terms of agility? Are there specific technologies that could potentially serve as game-changers in achieving this goal?

This workshop focuses on agile movements, ranging from natural animal behaviors to robot movements. While agile movements have been observed in numerous animals and robots, there is still a need for comprehensive discussions on the essence of agility, particularly among researchers from diverse fields, including roboticists, biomechanics experts, neuroscientists, biologists, and physicists. The primary objective of this workshop is to delve into the concept of imparting ‘Agility’ to robots, a longstanding challenge in robotics research. To address this challenge effectively, we aim to involve researchers from various disciplines who may not typically participate in robotics conferences.

The topics of interest include but are not limited to the following: