IJCAI 2009 Robotics

IJCAI 2009 Robotics Exhibition and Workshop

The 2009 IJCAI Robotics Exhibition and Workshop featuring

    The Robot Exhibition
    Mobile Manipulation Challenge
    Learning from Demonstration Challenge
    Multi-Robot Teaming Challenge
    Student Robotics Challenge
    Workshop: Building on Academic Robotics

and

    2010 Challenge Planning Event @ Willow Garage


Held in conjunction with IJCAI 2009, The International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence

July 13-16, 2009
Pasadena, CA, USA

The Eighteenth Edition of Robotics Program at AAAI and IJCAI will feature the long-standing Robotics Exhibitions as well as demonstration of challenges in emerging areas of robotics research. The Robotics Program has a long tradition of demonstrating innovating research in robotics at the intersection with artificial intelligence. This year, the IJCAI-09 Robotics Program will feature an open robotics exhibition, demonstrations for robotics challenge problems, and a workshop to present current results and discuss future directions.

Moving forward, the theme for IJCAI-09 Robotics is “New Challenges for Robotics“. This theme aims to cultivate challenge experiments to advance specific problems in robotics research and education. Each challenge is intended to be an experiment designed to motivate and evaluate an individual function of artificial intelligence for robotics, similar to the Semantic Robot Vision Challenge at AAAI-07. These challenges are meant to identify problems of interest as well as promote common metrics and experiments that are reproducible by individual researchers.

This year, we invite participants to demonstrate projects related to the following challenges:

        Mobile Manipulation: in the form of fetching various household objects

        Learning from Demonstration: teaching robots policies through human guidance

        Multi-Robot Teaming: such as for wireless coverage and other scenarios

        Student Robotics Challenge: to motivate educational participation and curriculum

These demonstrations will serve as a foundation more refined and commonly pursued challenges for 2010, as well as other emerging challenges.

Technical Program (subject to change)

Monday, July 13: IJCAI Robotics Workshop

Monday, July 13th	Robotics Workshop	Location: Pasadena Convention Center (212/214)
Time	Speaker	Title
8:30	Ayanna Howard (Georgia Tech)	Welcome Remarks
8:35 Invited Talk	Giorgio Metta (U. Genoa)	Invited talk: "The iCub: an open source humanoid robot for research in embodied cognition"
SESSION	Chairs: Radu Rusu (TU Munich) Matei Ciocarlie (Columbia)	Mobile Manipulation Challenge
9:00	Morgan Quigley (Stanford)	STAIR
9:06	Bill Smart (Washington U)	RIDE: The Robot Interactive Display Environment
9:12	Rod Grupen (UMass-Amherst)
9:18	Alexander Stoytchev (Iowa State)
9:24 Invited Talk	Bill Townsend (Barrett Technology)	Invited Talk
9:45	-- Break --
SESSION	Chairs: Deb Burhans (Canisus) Zach Dodds (Harvey Mudd)	Student Robotics Challenge
10:00	Zach Dodds (HMC)	Fast, Cheap, and Under Control
10:06	Deb Burhans (Canisus)
10:12	Sheila Tejada (CUNY Brooklyn College)	Creating a Toolkit for Mixed-Reality Collaborative Environments
10:18	Dave Touretzky (CMU)	The Chiara Hexapod
10:24	Clement Allen (Florida A&M)
10:30	Trevor Jay (U. Alabama)	CV-NICS: A Machine Learning Approach to the Correspondence Problem
SESSION	Chair: Monica Anderson (U. Alabama)	At-Large Exhibitors
10:36	Kyungnam (Ken) Kim (HRL)	C2M: Coordinated Cognitive Machines
10:42	Jeff Croxell (SIUE)	Accelerometer Based Discovery of Link Twist and Link Length
10:48	Andrew Nyambwek (SIUE)	Improving Situation Awareness using a Tangible User Interface
SESSION	Chair: Andrea Thomaz (Georgia Tech)	Learning by Demonstration Challenge
10:54	Dan Grollman (Brown)	Infinite Multimap Regression for Learning Robot Soccer from Demonstration
11:00	Sonia Chernova (CMU)	Confidence-Based Robot Policy Learning from Demonstration
11:06	Maya Cakmak (Georgia Tech)	Interactive Task Learning with Continuous and Discrete Features
11:12	Charles Pippin (Georgia Tech)	Learning Outdoor Mobile Robot Behaviors by Example
11:18	Brad Knox (UT-Austin)	Interactive shaping of a Tetris-playing TAMER agent
11:24 Invited Talk	Bob Kohout (DARPA)	Invited talk
12:00 pm	-- Lunch – (on your own)
SESSION	Chairs: Radhika Nagpal (Harvard) Chih-han Yu (Harvard) Justin Werfel (NECSI/Harvard Medical School)	Multi-robot Challenge
13:20	Ricardo Martins, Paulo Sousa Dias, Jose Pinto, P. B. Sujit, Joao Borges (U. Porta)
13:26	Chih-Han Yu (Harvard)
13:32	Wei-Min Shen (USC)	Superbot: Self-Reconfigurable Robot
13:38	David Leal-Martinez (Finland)
13:44 Invited Talk	Chris Jones (iRobot Corp.)	Invited talk
14:05	-- Break --
14:20 Invited Talk	Aaron Edsinger (Meka Robotics)	Invited talk
14:40 Invited Talk	Brian Gerkey (Willow Garage)	Invited talk
15:00 Invited Talk	Stewart Tansley (Microsoft Research)	Invited talk: "Social HRI challenge"
15:30	-- Break --
PANEL	Chair: Chad Jenkins (Brown)	Citizen Science and Robotics
15:45	Panelists: Fred Martin (UMass-Lowell) Kipp Bradford (Make Magazine) Jim Wright (Seattle Robotics Society)	Citizen Science and Robotics Panel
16:20	All participants	Break out sessions, discussion of future challenges
16:50	All participants	Citizen Science Wrap up, selection of challenges
16:55	Chad Jenkins (Brown)	Closing remarks
17:00	-- End of workshop --

Tuesday, July 14: IJCAI Robotics Exhibition

Tuesday, July 14th	Robotics Exhibition	Location: Pasadena Convention Center (212/214)
7:00-10:00	Exhibition setup
10:30-16:00	Exhibition

Wednesday, July 15: IJCAI Robotics Exhibition

Wednesday, July 15th	Robotics Exhibition	Location: Pasadena Convention Center (212/214)
10:00-16:00	Exhibition

Thursday, July 16: IJCAI Robotics Exhibition

Thursday, July 16th	Robotics Exhibition	Location: Pasadena Convention Center (212/214)
10:00-12:00	Exhibition
12:00-16:00	Exhibit break down and ship out

*** 2010 Planning Event @ Willow Garage ***

In preparation for AAAI 2010 Robotics Challenges, a special planning event will be collocated with the AAAI-09 Spring Symposia to propose and discuss potential challenge problems. This event will be located at Willow Garage during the afternoon of March 25, 2009 and open to all participants of the Spring Symposia. More details for the agenda and logistics of this event are to come soon and will be posted here.

If you plan to attend this event, please RSVP by sending an email to Monica Anderson.

Challenges for AAAI 2010 will be announced during the IJCAI-09 Robotics Program.

Slides from this meeting are available online.

Call for Participation

IJCAI-09 Robotics Exhibition

The Robotics Exhibition is open to demonstrations in all areas of robotics research, education, and commercial development. Demonstrations are preferred to be live demonstrations of robots in action, but can also be combined video and poster presentations of interesting robotics projects.

Those interested in exhibiting should prepare a 1-2 page proposal containing:

    (1) the names and affiliation of the exhibiters;
    (2) a summary of the objectives and methods of the underlying research; and
    (3) description or visual of what the exhibit (or video) will show.

The proposal must be emailed to Monica Anderson by March 30, 2009 as a PDF document.

IJCAI-09 Robotics Challenges

Participation in the Robotics Challenges will be handled by the organizers of the individual challenges. Please refer to the websites for the individual challenges or consult the corresponding organizers.

IJCAI-09 Robotics Workshop

All participants accepted for the Robotics Exhibition and Challenges are invited to participate in the IJCAI-09 Robotics Workshop. Proposals for participation in the workshop alone will not be considered.

Important Dates (tentative)

    11/04/08    Call for Participation Announced
    03/30/09    1-page Exhibition Proposal Due
    04/05/09    Notification of Acceptance
    04/10/09    (Revised) Notification of Acceptance
    03/25/09    Special AAAI-10 planning event at AAAI-09 SSS
    05/15/09    (Revised) 2-page Abstract for Proceedings due
    07/11/09    IJCAI 2009 (July 11-17th)
    07/13/09    IJCAI 2009 Robotics Workshop
    07/14/09    IJCAI 2009 Robotics Challenges and Exhibition begins
    07/16/09    IJCAI 2009 Robotics Challenges and Exhibition ends

Registration, Housing, and Travel

    Team Registration forms: TBD

    Conference hotel: TBD

    Expense Reimbursement form: TBD

Organizing Committee

Event Co-Chairs:

        Chad Jenkins (Brown University)
        Monica Anderson (University of Alabama)

Workshop Chair:

       Ayanna Howard (Georgia Tech)

Learning from Demonstration Chair:

        Andrea Thomaz (Georgia Tech)

Mobile Manipulation Co-Chairs:

        Radu Rusu (TU Munich)
        Matei Ciocarlie (Columbia University)

Multi-Robot Teaming Co-Chairs:

        Radhika Nagpal (Harvard University)
        Chih-Han Yu (Harvard University)
        Justin Werfel (NECSI/Harvard Medical School)

Student Robotics Challenge Co-Chairs:

        Zach Dodds (Harvey Mudd College)
        Deb Burhans (Canisius College)