Workshop Gallery:

Introduction

Robots are made to interact, actively and passively. Ability of awareness and exploitation of contacts with the surrounding environment (including humans) are becoming increasingly important for robots (both physically hard and soft ones) to accomplish social and task-oriented interactions, agilely and safely. While kinesthetic perception and intrinsic contact sensing could bring in information of contact centroid and interactive force, it is difficult to assess complex contact scenarios that relate to large areas or multi-point, multi-modal contact, especially for soft robots and human-robot interactions. Therefore, technology of large-scale sensing of whole-arm, whole-body robots and related perception, interaction, and control methods are deemed important for realization of embodied intelligence for robots.

Objectives

In this workshop, we plan to revisit recent developments and clarify underexplored challenges and potentials of large-scale sensing technology through in-depth discussions among interdisciplinary researchers and audiences. In more details, objectives of this workshop are to discuss:

1. Recent advances in materials and manufacturing approaches have opened new possibilities for the design of robotic skins that are scalable, multimodal, and durable. Especially, seamless integration of multimodal large-scale sensing into the robot's body will be intensively discussed to find out existing bottleneck issues in this field.

2. Challenges in calibrations, acquisition, processing, as well as transferring large-scale multimodal sensing data at low latency. Here, methods for characterizations of the robotic skin's properties, compressive sensing, neuromorphic sensing will be elaborated.

3. Analytical and data-driven approaches for modeling tactile (including proximity) perception of the large-scale skin. Here, Sim2Real approach or physics engines that allow closed-form solution or learning methods will be showcased to illustrate the emerging importance of such approaches in this field.

4. Underexplored potentials of large-scale robotic skin in realization of task-based touch and social interaction in human-robot systems.

Challenges to be discussed through talks and panel discussions:

• Challenges on material, manufacturing, and response calibration:

• Challenges on communication in scaling up: synchronization, real-time, saturation in communication

• Challenges on the spatial calibration

• Challenges on representing and processing the tactile skin data in a standard way:

• Challenges with multimodal feedback:

• Challenges on the applications of large-area tactile sensing: object/features recognition, robot control and contact reaction, human-robot interaction, contact interpretation (semantic)

• Challenges on creating tactile-based Sim2real environment

• Open challenges for future research

Invited Speakers

We are glad to announce these following speakers (in alphabetical order) will have officially confirmed to have a talk at our event:

Confirmed:

Workshop Format:

This workshop will be held in a hybrid format: Onsite (Kyoto, Japan) and Online. (see here for a glance at the program)

We plan to avoid invited talk-oriented WS style, where common participants hardly have time to join discussions with speakers due to lengthy talks, by planning reasonable timing for talks and focusing on fostering poster sessions (or breakout sessions on Online meeting tool) and panel discussions. Details can be found below:

1. The invited talks will be limited to a maximum of 15 mins. Speakers will be required to shortly summarize their results, while also indicating vision or discussion points facilitating interactions with the participants;

2. Each session of the WS will be featured by invited talks, followed by thorough discussions among speakers and participants. Topics for discussion will be brought by Organizers based on suggestions from speakers and participants (based on survey upon registration for the WS);

3. Posters will be called in advance to promote the interactive session. We will encourage invited speakers to send their students/colleagues to the presenting posters at the interactive session. We expect to have at least 8 posters in the interactive session

We expect to see many colleagues at this event by sending the abstract of your relevant works

Important Dates:

• Deadline for abstract submission: September 15th, 2022 (23:59 PST)

• Notification of acceptance: A notification will be given on a rolling basis within the 14 days of submission

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