Workshop on Bridging the Lab-to-Real Gap: Conversations with Academia, Industry, and Government

Workshop Overview

Deploying robots and other autonomous systems on a large scale requires that both its designers and the general public trust that they behave as intended. Establishing this trust requires being able to certify properties and behaviors of robots — including both traditional attributes in robotics like safety or robustness and emerging concepts like fairness and privacy — at scale and across a wide range of operating environments. How can we validate that robots are operating safely in the real, uncertain, and interactive world?

There are many state-of-the-art approaches working towards answering this question, including reachability analysis, rare-event simulation, fault detection, risk-aware decision making, and others. These tools are beginning to make the transition from proof of concept to scalable solutions. The goal of this workshop is to foster communication between academic researchers, industry entities, and regulatory agencies on the topic of large-scale verification and deployment of robots in real-world applications. The program will expose academic researchers to the problems and workflows used in industry, and industry professionals and regulatory agencies to emerging theoretical and practical tools from academia. Our hope is that such a dialogue will accelerate the safe and widespread deployment of robotic systems in the long term. 

Value Statement

We can only reach our full potential as roboticists, researchers, educators, and students when we harness the broad perspectives and skills of the diverse community. We will encourage discussion between people of all identities, backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. We are committed to providing a thought-provoking program which will encourage such open and collaborative discussions. 

Invited Speakers

Organizers

Princeton University