CoTeSys-ROS Fall School on Cognition-enabled Mobile Manipulation.

What was it about?

In the first week of November we concluded a first and very successful CoTeSys-ROS School on “Cognition-enabled Mobile Manipulation”. As the name implies the focus of the school was everyday manipulation in human living environments, an area which plays an essential role in personal robotics. By investing in open source, we aimed to lay the groundwork for the use of personal robotics applications in everyday life. Since ROS is an important catalyst for developing research projects and applications that will push the boundaries of personal robotics as we know it, ROS played a central role in the School's agenda.

Who participated?

The school attracted 65 students and researchers from European and American universities and research institutes. Most of the participants also gave 3-minutes flash talks which spun off numerous research discussions and ideas for possible collaborations.

What did they do?

All of the participants were faced with the common challenge - to learn about ROS and basic theory leading up to the mobile manipulation through talks, and to code basic building blocks that would enable the robot to navigate to table, perceive objects on it, infer missing ones and possible storage locations of thereof, and finally, to navigate to these locations, fetch the missing objects and bring them to the table. As a result there are now tutorials with solutions available for navigation, perception, planning and grasping, knowledge processing and reasoning about missing objects. They are highly re-usable if you are a young researcher in the field of mobile manipulation and want to get quickly up and going.

Who organized it?

The School was jointly organized by CoTeSys cluster of TUM (Technische Universität München) and Willow Garage and featured talks from world renowned experts in the field of mobile manipulation.

Feedback from some of the participants

• """Perhaps the most valuable was meeting researchers and other phd students working in research areas closely related to my own, but of course the talks and tutorials themselves were almost as valuable; it would have taken much longer to learn all these things on my own. also, I really appreciated the fact that most of the speakers and willow garage people were present most of the time and available for interaction, instead of just stopping by for their own talk."""
• """Can't think of any improvements, the program was really comprehensive and well balanced. The selection of speakers was excellent."""
• """The layout of the workshop managed to cover a great deal of what robotics is comprised of. So, regarding breadth it has been quite comprehensive and all major working directions have been covered."""