Closing the Academia to Real-World Gap in Service Robotics

RSS 2020 workshop website:
https://sites.google.com/cs.washington.edu/rss-2020-service-robots/home

Despite increasing commercial demand, progress in learning methods for robotics, and the decrease in hardware costs, service robots are still far from helping us. Implicitly or explicitly, the assumptions and the way experiments are conducted in laboratories lead to research that is extremely hard to transfer to real use. As a result, scientific research becomes locked within the university environment while companies must revisit and re-validate academic work. More often than not, they develop their own methods to bring robots closer to the market. Our goal is to bring together experts in academia and industry to uncover issues that so far have bounded research to the laboratory environment and discuss the design of methods with potential towards effective, real-world deployment of service robots.

We envision the achievement of two goals: From the academic perspective, to identify research practices that align with real-world use, increasing long-term impact and practical value. From the industrial perspective, to help research scientists outside academia identify academic work with potential towards technological readiness. Researchers from both industry and academia will be encouraged to provide their insights to decrease the technical transfer gap and promote collaboration. We encourage the submission of both new research as well as short retrospectives that discuss practical limitations of past papers that the authors wish to document for future readers.

Panelists
. Leila Takayama (University of California, Santa Cruz)
. Satoru Satake (ATR)
. Pieter Abbeel (UC Berkeley, Covariant)
. Carlos Celemin (TU Delft)
. Heni Ben Amor (Arizona State University)
. Serena Ivaldi (Inria)
. Tetsuya Ogata (Waseda University)
. Surya Singh (Intuitive Surgical)