Forum on Robotic Food Manipulation Challenge

Objectives

This forum focuses on robotic technologies for food manipulation, especially cooking. Robotics and AI solutions for food are becoming a trend these days. Some companies, including industry leaders and startups, are working in this field. There are also increasing social demands, as aging societies will need assistive robots to support people's quality of life. However, food manipulation is still a challenging problem in robotics since we need to unify a number of different technologies.

Food manipulation involves many challenging problems in robotics. For example, manipulation of non-rigid objects (vegetables, fruits, meats, liquids, powders, etc.), tool use, control of food state (raw/overcooked, shape, viscosity, content of salt/sugar/acidity, etc.), and adaptation to personalized taste. It requires a wide range of technologies, such as motion planning, machine learning, computer vision, robot hands, and non-visual sensing. In this forum, we will discuss the state of the art and how to unify these technologies to achieve applications such as cooking, industrial food manipulation, and assistive robots.

In this forum, we discuss designing food manipulation challenge, which is a competition of robotic food manipulation. As unifying many different technologies is important in robotic food manipulation, we believe that having competitions is a promising approach to gather researchers from different fields, share ideas to solve problems, and collaborate with each other toward better robotic food manipulation. This forum is for brainstorming such competitions.

How to join?

This forum consists of on-demand videos (Oct 25-Nov 25) and an interactive panel discussion (Dec 3).

On-demand videos (Oct 25-Nov 25)

1. From the IROS'20 website, register to the conference (FREE!)

2. visit "On-Demand Conference"
   --> "Workshops and Tutorials"
   --> "Forums"

3. Click "Forum on Robotic Food Manipulation Challenge"

The videos are available through the main conference period (Oct 25-Nov 25).

Details are available on the Speakers page.

Panel discussion (Dec 3)

For brainstorming the design of robotic food manipulation competitions, we have panel discussions with the invited speakers. We would like to invite you to join the discussion!

This is held on Google Meet, for 1.5 hours.
Date & time: UTC: Thu, Dec 3, 2020, 01:00
JST (Tokyo,Japan): Thu, Dec 3, 2020, 10:00
EST (New York,USA): Wed, Dec 2, 2020, 20:00
PST (Seattle,USA): Wed, Dec 2, 2020, 17:00

Details are available on the Panel Discussion page.

Past Activities

• Workshop on Robotic Food Manipulation at Humanoids 2019

Acknowledgement

We thank Mr Takasuke Sonoyama to provide us a wonderful illustration of robotic food manipulation.