Abstract

Disaster areas and collapsed buildings, underground tunnels and caves these are one of the most demanding environments to traverse.

These surroundings are characterized by rough and unstable terrain, and the environment is changing over time. Additionally, in most of the cases, the visibility is low. Human operating in such an environment is put on high risk. Therefore, using robots in such cases is the need.

Due to their high mobility and locomotion capabilities, legged machines are becoming the robot of choice in such harsh conditions.

However, there are only a few real-world deployments of walking robots, and their performance in challenging scenarios still needs to be improved. In particular, we look for robots capable of navigating and mapping in dynamic environments, able to rapidly search and manipulate objects in challenging settings.

In our workshop, we are bringing together research and industry. This approach will help us in examining the different real-world application of walking robots and will provide the ground for the discussion about the missing technological ingredients for the successful and everyday deployment of legged robots. The workshop will feature invited speakers of high reputation as well as solicited papers.

Topics of interest

• Design and Control
  • mechatronical design
  • optimization-based co-design
  • model predictive and optimization-based control
  • whole-body control
• Path Planning, Perception, and Mapping
  • optimization-based and perceptive motion planning
  • sensor fusion under uncertainty
  • localization and mapping in static or dynamic environments
  • foot placement generation in rough terrain
  • feature extraction and semantic scene understanding
• Real-World Applications
  • disaster response
  • industrial inspection
  • payload delivery
  • mobile platform for manipulation tasks

Support

This proposed workshop is supported by the IEEE RAS Technical Committees on:

1) Whole-Body Control [Prof. Jaeheung Park, Dr. Federico Moro, Prof. Alexander Dietrich, and Prof. Luis Sentis]

2) Mechanism and Design [Prof. Claudio Semini, Prof. Kyujin Cho, Prof. Matei Ciocarlie, and Prof. Aaron Dollar]

3) Algorithms for Planning and Control of Robot Motion [Prof. Lydia Tapia and Prof. Sertac Karaman]