ICRA 2022 Preview: from Robots Inspired by Insects to Helping Robots Navigate and Interact

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From algorithms that help robots better navigate and interact with the world and humans, to robots inspired by insects, researchers at the University of California San Diego are making significant contributions to the field of robotics at the 2022 International Conference on Robotics and Automation taking place from May 23 to 27, 2022  in Philadelphia.

The conference brings together the world's top researchers and most important companies to share ideas and advances in the field. This year’s theme is “the future of work”. 

Henrik Christensen, director of the UC San Diego Contextual Robotics Institute, is the ICRA 2022 chair of forums for the conference and organized six forums: The future of work, Industry, Venture Capital, National Programs National Research Strategies and an entrepreneurship event.

“ICRA is the premier robotics conference and after two years of being virtual the objective is to be back to in-person presentations and networking. It is encouraging to see such a diverse set of strong contributions from UCSD from new mechanisms over medical systems to next generation transportation” says Henrik Christensen. 

Nikolay Atanasov, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is the conference’s chair of workshops, overseeing 51 events. He is also giving a talk titled “Signed Directional Distance Functions” at the Robotic Perception and Mapping workshop, May 23, 2022. 

Laurel Riek, a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, will be speaking at a workshop on "Shared Autonomy in Physical Human-Robot Interaction: Adaptability and Trust.” The working title of her talk is "Proximate Human Robot Teaming: Fluent and Trustworthy Interaction".  

Sylvia Herbert is one of the organizers of the Debates on the Future of Robotics workshop, which tackles topics such as the state of robotics as an academic discipline, its relationship with other fields in computer science and engineering, and its broader social and economic impacts. 

Below is a list of papers, with their authors:

P2SLAM: Bearing Based WiFi SLAM for Indoor Robots

Aditya Arun, Roshan Ayyalasomayajula, William Hunter and Dinesh Bharadia, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, UC San Diego

Autonomous Actuation of Flapping Wing Robots Inspired by Asynchronous Insect Muscle

James Lynch and Nick Gravish, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, UC San Diego

Jeff Gau and Simon Sponberg, School of Physics, Georgia Institute of Technology

TridentNetV2: Lightweight Graphical Global Plan Representations for Dynamic Trajectory Generation

David Paz, Hao Xiang, Andrew Liang, and Henrik I. Christensen

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California San Diego

Combining suction and friction to stabilize a soft gripper to shear and normal forces, for manipulation of soft objects in wet environments

Jessica Sandova, Iman Adibnazari, Michael T. Tolley, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, UC San Diego

Thomas Xu, Dimitri D. Deheyn,  Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego

Look Closer: Bridging Egocentric and Third-person Views with Transformers for Robotic Manipulation

Rishabh Jangir, Nicklas Hansen, Sambaran Ghosal, Mohit Jain and Xiaolong Wang
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, UC San Diego
 

CRANE: a 10 Degree-of-Freedom, Tele-surgical System for Dexterous Manipulation within Imaging Bores

Dimitri Schreiber, Zhaowei Yu, Hanpeng Jiang, Taylor Henderson, Guosong Li1, Renjie Zhu,  and Michael C. Yip, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, UC San Diego
Alexander M. Norbash, Department of Radiology, UC San diego
Julie Yu, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, UC San Diego

Configuration Space Decomposition for Scalable Proxy Collision Checking in Robot Planning and Control

Mrinal Verghese, Nikhil Das, Yuheng Zhi, and Michael Yip
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, UC San Diego

Robotic Tool Tracking under Partially Visible Kinematic Chain: A Unified Approach

Florian Richter, Jingpei Lu, and Michael C. Yip, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, UC San Diego

Ryan K. Orosco, Department of Surgery, Division of Head and Neck Surgery, UC San Diego

Pose Estimation for Robot Manipulators via Keypoint Optimization and Sim-to-Real Transfer

Jingpei Lu, Florian Richter and Michael C. Yip, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, UC San Diego