Best paper awards from RSS 2024 and the Robocup Football Finals on Sunday 21 July
LiveStream! Which team are you cheering for?
As RSS 2024 comes to a close, the best paper announcements are out. RSS was held in Delft with nearly 900 attendees. That’s pretty good for a single track conference! Congratulations to:
Outstanding Demo Paper Award Finalists
Demonstrating CropFollow++: Robust Under-Canopy Navigation with Keypoints
Arun Narenthiran Sivakumar, Mateus Valverde Gasparino, Michael McGuire, Vitor Akihiro Hisano Higuti, M. Ugur Akcal, Girish Chowdhary
Winner
Demonstrating Agile Flight from Pixels without State Estimation
Ismail Geles, Leonard Bauersfeld, Angel Romero, Jiaxu Xing, Davide Scaramuzza
Outstanding Systems Paper Award Finalists
Universal Manipulation Interface: In-The-Wild Robot Teaching Without In-The-Wild Robots
Cheng Chi, Zhenjia Xu, Chuer Pan, Eric Cousineau, Benjamin Burchfiel, Siyuan Feng, Russ Tedrake, Shuran Song
Winner
Khronos: A Unified Approach for Spatio-Temporal Metric-Semantic SLAM in Dynamic Environments
Lukas Schmid, Marcus Abate, Yun Chang, Luca Carlone
Outstanding Student Paper Award Finalists
Winner
Dynamic On-Palm Manipulation via Controlled Sliding
William Yang, Michael Posa
Agile But Safe: Learning Collision-Free High-Speed Legged Locomotion
Tairan He, Chong Zhang, Wenli Xiao, Guanqi He, Changliu Liu, Guanya Shi
ScrewMimic: Bimanual Imitation from Human Videos with Screw Space Projection
Arpit Bahety, Priyanka Mandikal, Ben Abbatematteo, Roberto Martín-Martín
Outstanding Paper Award Finalists
Advancing Humanoid Locomotion: Mastering Challenging Terrains with Denoising World Model Learning
Xinyang Gu, Yen-Jen Wang, Xiang Zhu, Chengming Shi, Yanjiang Guo, Yichen Liu, Jianyu Chen
WINNER
Real-Time Anomaly Detection and Reactive Planning with Large Language Models
Rohan Sinha, Amine Elhafsi, Christopher Agia, Matt Foutter, Edward Schmerling, Marco Pavone
Configuration Space Distance Fields for Manipulation Planning
Yiming Li, Xuemin Chi, Amirreza Razmjoo, Sylvain Calinon
Ji Zhang and Sanjiv Singh Receive 2024 RSS Test of Time Award for LOAM: Lidar Odometry and Mapping in Real-Time
Carnegie Mellon systems scientist Ji Zhang has received the prestigious Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2024 Test of Time Award for his work on LOAM: Lidar Odometry and Mapping in Real-Time.
RSS introduced the Test of Time Award to acknowledge papers published at least ten years ago that had the greatest impact on robotics design or new approaches to problem solving. The award aims to cultivate discussion about developments in the robotics field by reflecting on the past and looking forward to future endeavors in the field. As this year’s awardee, Ji Zhang will present a virtual keynote on July 18th, with a Test of Time panel session devoted to his work on LOAM at the RSS 2024 conference.
“It’s called AI Meets Autonomy,” said Zhang. “The workshop is to bring researchers together from around the world to share their work at the intersection of natural language understanding, computer vision scene understanding, and autonomous navigation.” For more information.
Very Useful Stuff
If you are a (VC, PE, Grant) funded startup looking to drive pipeline, conduct customer discovery, find of the voice of the customer, or a mixture of these - our team is just the right mixture of nimble and structured.
I’ve seen Fulcrum Sales and Marketing deliver a full pipeline of qualified customers to SBIR startups embarking on fundraising. And they do it affordably. They’re a startup secret weapon and superpower. :)
RoboCup 2024
Sadly Team TH-MOS Adult was knocked out in the previous rounds, leading to HERoEHS facing Tsinghua Hephaestus in the Championships on Sunday 21 July at 11:00 CEST, followed by RoMeLa UCLA against NimbRo AdultSize playing at 13:00 for third place. The match will be livestreamed here:
If you know RoboCup, then you’ll know that not only are there several football leagues ranging in size, age and simulation (soccer for the Americans), and the Adult Humanoid league is considered the ultimate. Unless of course you think that it’s far more important to develop Rescue Robots (Robocup Rescue), or Robots for the Home (RoboCup@Home) or Robots for Industry (Robocup Industrial)
And RoboCup also has great kids competitions, not just in football but in rescue robotics and entertainment robotics. My first start in robot competitions was coaching my 10 year old’s RoboCup Rescue team to Nationals in Australia on our first attempt. Sadly, we totally failed to adapt to the lighting in the finals building, although the team were troubleshooting till the last minute.
Robot News
Researchers develop technique to give robots “embodied reasoning” abilities - VentureBeat
Robotics Applications Subcommittee to build on existing standards - The Robot Report
Ukraine Goes All-In on Ground Robots - Foreign Policy
From basement to battlefield: Ukrainian startups create low-cost robots to fight Russia - APNews
China wants humanoid robots to automate aged care, handle grunt work as demographics shift - South China Morning Post
Robots Helping To Build New Apartments in Seattle: The Future Is Here - The Seattle Medium
ROBOTS RISING? Manufacturers mull employing tech as it gets smarter, cheaper - PBN
Manufacturing Tech Market Map featuring Schematic Ventures portfolio - Schematic Ventures
Fanuc completes new US facility for automotive robots - DigiTimes Asia
Zoox CEO says robotaxis are still several years away from the ‘holy grail’ of the business: New York City - Fortune
Serve Robotics stock soars 241% after NVIDIA takes $4 million stake in the company - Business Insider
Intuitive’s da Vinci 5 robot launch ‘well ahead’ of Wall Street expectations - MedTechDIVE
Mini Report: Future of Warehouse Automation 2024 - STIQ Ltd
Warehouse Robotics Earnings: SYM, AutoStore, & Ocado Group - EJLawless
Agility Robotics’ humanoid Digit robot is working hard at its first real job - at a Spanx factory - Fortune
From serving to logistics, Bear Robotics’ AI robots can do it all - Korea JoongAng Daily
World’s tallest autonomous robot scans 100,000+ pallets daily at warehouse - Interesting Engineering
How AI and automation will reshape grocery stores and fast-food chains - CNBC
Robot-packed meals are coming to the frozen-food aisle - MIT Technology Review
Robot chefs are cooking food at 101 Chicken, a Korean restaurant in Fort Lee, New Jersey - ABC7
Could robot weedkillers replace the need for pesticides - The Guardian
Gaze into the Horrifying Eyes of M#GAN 2.0’s Robot Skeleton - Gizmodo
How ‘I, Robot’ eerily predicted the current dangers of AI - Fast Company
AI & robotics briefing: What is AI, really? - Nature
Opportunities
Apply for the CDL program here
The application deadline is Friday, July 26 2024
Nominations Open for Coolest Thing Made in California
Go to CoolestThingCalifornia.com to nominate your California-made product for the 2nd annual Coolest Thing Made in California Contest hosted by CMTA.
AI and Open Government Data Assets Request for Information
The U.S. Department of Commerce is committed to advancing transparency, innovation, and the responsible use and dissemination of public data assets, including for use by data-driven AI technologies. To this end, we are pleased to issue this Request for Information (RFI) to seek valuable insights from industry experts, researchers, civil society organizations, and other members of the public on the development of AI-ready open data assets and data dissemination standards.
IEEE Entrepreneurship Impact Award applications are OPEN
https://entrepreneurship.ieee.org/2024-announcing_impact_award/…
$2000 USD HONORARIUM
Do you know a person/team who significantly impacts the engineering-driven entrepreneurial ecosystem?
SUBMIT NOMINATIONS OR SELF APPLY
https://entrepreneurship.ieee.org/impact_award/
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IMTS Startup Innovation Pavilion
Present your groundbreaking solutions to a global audience and drive your business forward. We are excited to announce an incredible opportunity for a limited number of emerging companies in the automation and robotics sector to showcase their innovations free of charge at the Innovation Center within AMT’s Automation and Robotics Area.
AMT is particularly interested in companies offering practical solutions that span the digital automation spectrum (ie, we aren’t solely focused on hardware). If you are, or know of, any emerging companies (early stage, wouldn’t yet make sense for them to spring on a booth of their own) that would be a great fit for this unique showcase, please encourage them to submit their proposals using this web form.
About IMTS
The International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS) is one of the largest trade shows in the world. It takes place every even number year in Chicago. At IMTS 2022, 100,000 visitors saw 2,500+ exhibitors in 1,400,000 sq ft of exhibit space in Chicago’s McCormick’s Place. During that week, an est. $10B business was conducted (as reported through exhibitor survey).
Robot Events
FIRA is back! October 22-24 Woodland CA
And some more robotics conferences:
Automated Road Transport Symposium San Diego July 29 - Aug 1
Humanoid Robotics Festival Lima Peru Aug 14-15-16
CASE 2024 Puglia Italy 28 Aug - 1 Sep 2024
BioRob Heidelberg DE 1 Sep-Sep 4
Commercial UAV Expo : Sep 03 - Sep 05, 2024 . Las Vegas, United States of America
CLAWAR 2024 Kaiserslauten DE Sep 4 - Sep 6
ACTUATE Summit : Sep 18, 2024 . San Francisco - use SVROBO for 25% off
ICRA@40 Rotterdam NL 23 Sep - 26 Sep
ANTS (Swarm robotics) 2024 : Oct 09 - Oct 11, 2024 . Konstanz, Germany
IROS 2024 AbuDhabi 14 Oct - 18 Oct
FabTech Orlando 15 Oct -17 Oct
ROSCon Odense DK 21 Oct - 23 Oct
CORL Munich DE 6 Nov - 9 Nov
IEEE Future of Telepresence Pasadena CA 16 Nov - 17 Nov
Humanoids 2024 Nancy FR 26 Nov - 28 Nov
ProMat : Mar 17 - Mar 20, 2025 . Chicago, United States of America
ICRA 2025 Atlanta Georgia 17 May - 23 May 2025
For your information: illustrations Robocup 2024 (see flags) are made by elinevandemolengraft.nl (she is open to new work)!