Welcome to Yokohama and ICRA 2024!
Welcome to Yokohama and ICRA 2024!
A post a day for the next six days, plus the usual robotics funding stuff.
Did you know that the average technical recruiter is younger than 34? And that some studies show that they tend not to pick job candidates older than themselves? (still trying to track those ‘studies’ down).
The results of last week’s poll showed that 80% of the roboticists not being called back by recruiters were 50 yrs or older, as opposed to 20% of respondents who were younger. As most countries are getting older, this might be a major HR failure mode.
Welcome to Yokohama and ICRA 2024! More than 5000 roboticists and 120+ robotics companies, including the world’s leading quadruped and humanoid robots.
I forgot about losing a day en-route to Japan, so I won’t get the usual Saturday newsletter out, as it’s already Setup Sunday for the ICRA 24 Conference and Expo at Yokohama Pacifico in Japan.
So instead I’ll share some of the incredible things happening at ICRA 2024 and around the edges of the conference, at the confluence of industry, academia and the future.
You’d probably be attending the conference or reading the proceedings if you wanted a deep dive into all the papers, but these days academic robotics conferences are full of ecosystem building work, from robotics competitions, to industry exhibitions, to demos and short talks from industry, to career fairs, to robotics debates and humanoid robot panels and standards working groups, and all the behind the scenes work that volunteers in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society take on (on top of their real jobs teaching and researching, (or running Silicon Valley Robotics!).
The Future of Robotics Research Debates
Always one of my favorite events!
10.00-11.20AM JST: "Peer review is a too-noisy process biased by big names in the case of single-blind reviews at ICRA/IROS"
13.30-14.50PM JST: "Universities are irrelevant in an age of big tech and robotics"
15.15-16.35PM JST: "Generative AI will make a lot of traditional robotics approaches obsolete"
You can also revisit the previous year's debates by watching them on the Past Debates page. Each session is a gateway to exploring the future that robotics holds for us all. My thanks to the Organizing Committee (which is looking quite Australian atm)!
ICRA & IEEE RAS Career Website
A new initiative, the RAS Career Website is now open. There is also an in person Career Fair at ICRA, but anyone can sign up, submit their resumes and set job alerts.
ICRA Plenaries
Usually one of my favorite parts of the conference, but my schedule is packed. If I can’t send a summary of the talks, I’ll try to share the recordings.
Dr. Yoky Matsuoka
Managing Executive Officer of Panasonic Holdings, CEO of PanasonicWELL, and Founder & CEO of Yohana
How to Turn a Roboticist into a Corporate Explorer
In recent decades, the robotics industry has undergone a remarkable transformation. Technological advancements and robotics researchers embracing entrepreneurship have led to an increase in funding for robotics companies and an overall growth of companies producing significant revenue. It’s an exciting time to be in the field of robotics! In this talk, we will discuss various ways to innovate and create a meaningful business in the current global market. Specifically, I will introduce the concept of the corporate explorer and talk about a non-traditional path to innovation, incubation, and creating a massive impact.
Prof. Sami Haddadin
Robotics and Systems Intelligence, Technical University of Munich (TUM)
The Great Robot Accelerator: Collective Learning of Optimal Embodied AI
Robots have achieved unprecedented performance jumps over the last decade. As of today, however, robot design and build are laborious and suboptimal, costly and constitute a major limitation in achieving the anticipated robotics revolution. At the same time, we see intelligent machines that learn and perform tasks, and are able to generalize their skills to new contexts. However, robot learning faces seemingly unsolvable hurdles such as disembodied machine learning not being able to leverage our understanding of the physical reality, finding energy and time efficient solutions, or generalize to complex and dynamic manipulation skills. In this talk I will discuss the autonomous Co-Evolution of Embodiment and Intelligence as the central challenge of robotics. Only, when robots will evolve in an AI-propelled highly evolutionary process, we can finally reach the tipping point and automatically synthesize general purpose robots. I will introduce the concepts of Collective Learning and Optimal Embodied AI as two main pillars vital to this transformation towards an AI-Accelerated Robot Evolution.
Prof. Sunil K Agrawal
Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Rehabilitation Medicine, Columbia University
Rehabilitation Robotics: How to Improve Daily Functions in People with Impairments?
Neural disorders, old age, and traumatic brain injuries limit activities of daily living. Robotics can be used in novel ways to characterize human neuromuscular responses and retrain human functions. Columbia University Robotics and Rehabilitation (ROAR) Laboratory designs innovative robots with these goals and performs scientific studies to improve human functions such as standing, walking, stairclimbing, trunk control, head turning, and others. Human experiments have targeted individuals with stroke, cerebral palsy, Parkinson’s disease, ALS, and elderly subjects. The talk will provide an overview of these robotic technologies and scientific studies performed with them to demonstrate strong potential of rehabilitation robotics to improve human functions and quality of life of people around the world.
More Conferences!
Some more upcoming academic robotics conferences:
ICRA 2024 Yokohama Japan 13 May - 17 May 2024
ARSO 2024 Hong Kong, China 20 May - 22 May 2024
AIM 2024 Boston MA 14 July - 18 July
RSS Delft NL July 15-19
EMBC Orlando FL July 15-19
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
CLAWAR 2024 Kaiserslauten DE Sep 4 - Sep 6
ICRA@40 Rotterdam NL 23 Sep - 26 Sep
IROS 2024 AbuDhabi 14 Oct - 18 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
ICRA 2025 Atlanta Georgia 17 May - 23 May 2025