Artificial Muscles, Robotic Grippers, Health Care Robotics

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From a gripper equipped with gecko-inspired adhesives, to artificial muscles and robotic joints, to talks on human-robot interaction and health care robotics, the University of California San Diego will have a strong presence at the 2018 International Conference on Robotics and Automation, May 21 to 25 in Brisbane, Australia.

The event is the flagship conference of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society and a premier international forum for robotics researchers to present their work. Established in 1984 and held annually, the conference joins experts in the field of robotics and automation for technical communications through presentations and discussions. Henrik Christensen, director of UC San Diego’s Contextual Robotics Institute, is the co-chair of the conference’s government forum.

“The ICRA conference is the premier venue for presentation of robotics research and it is important for an institute such as the Contextual Robotics Institute at UC San Diego to have a significant presence to promote our research, but also to promote the Institute for future recruiting of students, faculty and industry partners” said Henrik I Christensen, director of the Institute.

Christensen is also a speaker at the conference’s Industry Forum, and co-organizer of a workshop on Robot Teammates Operating in Dynamic, Unstructured Environments. In addition, Nikolai Atanasov, a professor in the UC San Diego Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is one of the organizers of a workshop on Perception, Inference, and Learning for Joint Semantic, Geometric, and Physical Understanding.

Laurel Riek, a professor in the UC San Diego Department of Computer Science and Engineering, will give talks at two workshops: New Horizons in Cognitive Robotics and AI and Elderly Care Robotics—Technology and Ethics.

Research papers presented by UC San Diego faculty:

A soft robotic gripper with gecko-inspired adhesive
Paul Glick, Srinivasan A. Suresh , Donald Ruffatto, Mark Cutkosky, Michael T. Tolley, and Aaron Parness

Bundled Super-Coiled Polymer Artificial Muscles: Design, Characterization, and Modeling
A. Simeonov, T. Henderson, Z. Lan, G. Sundar, A. Factor, J. Zhang and M. C. Yip

Vision-based Force Feedback Estimation for Robot-assisted Surgery using Instrument-constrained Biomechanical 3D Maps
Nazim Haochine, Winnie Kuang, Stephane Cotin, and Michael Yip

A Tensegrity-Inspired Compliant 3-DOF Compliant Joint
Jeffrey M. Friesen, John L. Dean, Thomas Bewley, Vytas Sunspiral

Workshops co-organized by UC San Diego faculty

Robot Teammates Operating in Dynamic, Unstructured Environments (RT-DUNE)

Perception, Inference, and Learning for Joint Semantic, Geometric, and Physical Understanding