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#437596 IROS Robotics Conference Is Online Now ...
The 2020 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) was originally going to be held in Las Vegas this week. Like ICRA last spring, IROS has transitioned to a completely online conference, which is wonderful news: Now everyone everywhere can participate in IROS without having to spend a dime on travel.
IROS officially opened yesterday, and the best news is that registration is entirely free! We’ll take a quick look at what IROS has on offer this year, which includes some stuff that’s brand news to IROS.
Registration for IROS is super easy, and did we mention that it’s free? To register, just go here and fill out a quick and easy form. You don’t even have to be an IEEE Member or anything like that, although in our unbiased opinion, an IEEE membership is well worth it. Once you get the confirmation email, go to https://www.iros2020.org/ondemand/, put in the email address you used to register, and that’s it, you’ve got IROS!
Here are some highlights:
Plenaries and Keynotes
Without the normal space and time constraints, you won’t have to pick and choose between any of the three plenaries or 10 keynotes. Some of them are fancier than others, but we’re used to that sort of thing by now. It’s worth noting that all three plenaries (and three of the 10 keynotes) are given by extraordinarily talented women, which is excellent to see.
Technical Tracks
There are over 1,400 technical talks, divided up into 12 categories of 20 sessions each. Note that each of the 12 categories that you see on the main page can be scrolled through to show all 20 of the sessions; if there’s a bright red arrow pointing left or right you can scroll, and if the arrow is transparent, you’ve reached the end.
On the session page, you’ll see an autoplaying advertisement (that you can mute but not stop), below which each talk has a preview slide, a link to a ~15 minute presentation video, and another link to a PDF of the paper. No supplementary videos are available, which is a bit disappointing. While you can leave a comment on the video, there’s no way of interacting with the author(s) directly through the IROS site, so you’ll have to check the paper for an email address if you want to ask a question.
Award Finalists
IROS has thoughtfully grouped all of the paper award finalists together into nine sessions. These are some truly outstanding papers, and it’s worth watching these sessions even if you’re not interested in specific subject matter.
Workshops and Tutorials
This stuff is a little more impacted by asynchronicity and on-demandedness, and some of the workshops and tutorials have already taken place. But IROS has done a good job at collecting videos of everything and making them easy to access, and the dedicated websites for the workshops and tutorials themselves sometimes have more detailed info. If you’re having trouble finding where the workshops and tutorial section is, try the “Entrance” drop-down menu up at the top.
IROS Original Series
In place of social events and lab tours, IROS this year has come up with the “IROS Original Series,” which “hosts unique content that would be difficult to see at in-person events.” Right now, there are some interviews with a diverse group of interesting roboticists, and hopefully more will show up later on.
Enjoy!
Everything on the IROS On-Demand site should be available for at least the next month, so there’s no need to try and watch a thousand presentations over three days (which is what we normally have to do). So, relax, and enjoy yourself a bit by browsing all the options. And additional content will be made available over the next several weeks, so make sure to check back often to see what’s new.
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#437585 Dart-Shooting Drone Attacks Trees for ...
We all know how robots are great at going to places where you can’t (or shouldn’t) send a human. We also know how robots are great at doing repetitive tasks. These characteristics have the potential to make robots ideal for setting up wireless sensor networks in hazardous environments—that is, they could deploy a whole bunch of self-contained sensor nodes that create a network that can monitor a very large area for a very long time.
When it comes to using drones to set up sensor networks, you’ve generally got two options: A drone that just drops sensors on the ground (easy but inaccurate and limited locations), or using a drone with some sort of manipulator on it to stick sensors in specific places (complicated and risky). A third option, under development by researchers at Imperial College London’s Aerial Robotics Lab, provides the accuracy of direct contact with the safety and ease of use of passive dropping by instead using the drone as a launching platform for laser-aimed, sensor-equipped darts.
These darts (which the researchers refer to as aerodynamically stabilized, spine-equipped sensor pods) can embed themselves in relatively soft targets from up to 4 meters away with an accuracy of about 10 centimeters after being fired from a spring-loaded launcher. They’re not quite as accurate as a drone with a manipulator, but it’s pretty good, and the drone can maintain a safe distance from the surface that it’s trying to add a sensor to. Obviously, the spine is only going to work on things like wood, but the researchers point out that there are plenty of attachment mechanisms that could be used, including magnets, adhesives, chemical bonding, or microspines.
Indoor tests using magnets showed the system to be quite reliable, but at close range (within a meter of the target) the darts sometimes bounced off rather than sticking. From between 1 and 4 meters away, the darts stuck between 90 and 100 percent of the time. Initial outdoor tests were also successful, although the system was under manual control. The researchers say that “regular and safe operations should be carried out autonomously,” which, yeah, you’d just have to deal with all of the extra sensing and hardware required to autonomously fly beneath the canopy of a forest. That’s happening next, as the researchers plan to add “vision state estimation and positioning, as well as a depth sensor” to avoid some trees and fire sensors into others.
And if all of that goes well, they’ll consider trying to get each drone to carry multiple darts. Look out, trees: You’re about to be pierced for science.
“Unmanned Aerial Sensor Placement for Cluttered Environments,” by André Farinha, Raphael Zufferey, Peter Zheng, Sophie F. Armanini, and Mirko Kovac from Imperial College London, was published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.
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