Join us for the inaugural Northwest Robotics Symposium. This free, all day event will bring together students, postdocs, industry researchers and faculty working in robotics. Forty presenters will share talks and posters on papers published at robotics conferences. We hope to help make up for two-plus years of missed in-person networking as a result of the pandemic.
The symposium also invited researchers to share unpublished projects. We did not referee these submissions and are not producing an archival proceedings of any of the works presented.
We are grateful for the support of the UW + Amazon Science Hub.
Reflection
The first ever NWRS welcomed forty presenters from across UW, OSU, SFU, NVIDIA and Microsoft.
Recording
The opening and talk sessions were streamed and recorded:
Schedule
| 8:00 | Breakfast, check-in, poster setup |
| 8:50 | Welcome |
| 9:00 | Talk session 1 |
| 10:30 | Break |
| 11:00 | Talk session 2 |
| 12:30 | Lunch |
| 13:30 | Talk session 3 |
| 15:00 | Poster session |
| 16:00 | Demos & Lab Tours |
| 16:30 | Reception & Townhall |
| 17:00 | Closing |
We know many participants will be traveling to Seattle in the morning. You will be able to check in whenever you arrive.
Talk session 1 chaired by Josh Smith (9 talks)
| Naomi Fitter | "Comedians
in cafes getting data: Comparing performances of a robotic stand-up comedian
in the wild" John Vilk, Naomi T. Fitter |
HRI 2020 | 🔴 |
| Ameer Helmi | "Design of an assistive robot for infant mobility interventions" Ashwin Vinoo, Layne Case, Gabriela R. Zott, Joseline Raja Vora, Ameer Helmi, Samuel W. Logan, Naomi T. Fitter |
RO-MAN 2021 | 🔴 |
| Ethan K. Gordon | "Leveraging
Post Hoc Context for Faster Learning in Bandit Settings with Applications
in Robot-Assisted Feeding" Ethan K. Gordon, Sumegh Roychowdhury, Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee, Kevin Jamieson, Siddhartha S. Srinivasa |
ICRA 2021 | 🔴 |
| Nick Walker | "Human
Perceptions of a Curious Robot that Performs Off-Task Actions" Nick Walker, Kevin Weatherwax, Julian Allchin, Leila Takayama, Maya Cakmak |
HRI 2020 | 🔴 |
| Amal Nanavati | "Modeling Human Helpfulness
with Individual and Contextual Factors for Robot Planning" Amal Nanavati, Christoforos Mavrogiannis, Kevin Weatherwax, Leila Takayama, Maya Cakmak, Siddhartha S. Srinivasa |
RSS 2021 | 🔴 |
| Michael Jae-Yoon Chung | "Iterative Repair of Social Robot Programs from Implicit User Feedback via Bayesian
Inference" Michael Jae-Yoon Chung, Maya Cakmak |
RSS 2020 | 🔴 |
| Brian Zhang | "Bringing WALL-E out of the Silver Screen: Understanding How Transformative Robot Sound
Affects Human Perception" Brian J. Zhang, Nick Stargu, Samuel Brimhall, Lilian Chan, Jason Fick, Naomi T. Fitter |
ICRA 2021 | 🔴 |
| Boling Yang | "Motivating Physical Activity via Competitive Human-Robot Interaction" Boling Yang, Golnaz Habibi, Patrick Lancaster, Byron Boots, Joshua Smith |
CoRL 2021 | 🔴 |
| Alan G. Sanchez | "A Shared Autonomy Surface Disinfection System Using a Mobile Manipulator
Robot" Alan G. Sanchez, William B. Smart |
SSRR 2021 | 🔴 |
Talk session 2 chaired by Karthik Desingh (9 talks)
| Zhitian Zhang | "A Multimodal and Hybrid Framework for Human Navigational Intent Inference" Zhitian Zhang, Jimin Rhim, Angelica Lim, Mo Chen |
IROS 2021 | 🔴 |
| Ian C. Rankin | "Robotic Information Gathering using Semantic Language Instructions" Ian C. Rankin, Seth McCammon, Geoffrey A. Hollinger |
ICRA 2021 | 🔴 |
| Rogerio Bonatti | "Reshaping Robot Trajectories Using Natural Language Commands: A Study of Multi-Modal
Data Alignment Using Transformers" Arthur Bucker, Luis Figueredo, Sami Haddadin, Ashish Kapoor, Shuang Ma, Rogerio Bonatti |
IROS 2022 | 🔴 |
| Wentao Yuan | "SORNet: Spatial Object-Centric Representations for Sequential Manipulation" Wentao Yuan, Chris Paxton, Karthik Desingh, Dieter Fox |
CoRL 2021 | 🔴 |
| Alan Fern | "Sim-to-Real Learning of All Common Bipedal Gaits via Periodic Reward
Composition" Jonah Siekmann, Yesh Godse, Alan Fern, Jonathan Hurst |
ICRA 2021 | 🔴 |
| Jeremy Dao | "Sim-to-Real Learning for Bipedal
Locomotion Under Unsensed Dynamic Loads" Jeremy Dao, Kevin Green, Helei Duan, Alan Fern, Jonathan Hurst |
ICRA 2022 | 🔴 |
| Ashish Kapoor | "Sample-efficient Safe Learning for Online Nonlinear Control with Control Barrier
Functions" Wenhao Luo, Wen Sun, Ashish Kapoor |
WAFR 2022 | 🔴 |
| Sai Vemprala | "Representation Learning for Event-based Visuomotor Policies" Sai Vemprala, Sami Mian, Ashish Kapoor |
NeurIPS 2021 | 🔴 |
| Michael Lu | "LBGP: Learning Based Goal Planning for Autonomous Following in Front" Payam Nikdel, Richard Vaughan, Mo Chen |
ICRA 2021 | 🔴 |
Talk session 3 chaired by Sawyer Fuller (8 talks)
| Kevin Green | "Blind bipedal stair traversal via sim-to-real reinforcement learning" Jonah Siekmann, Kevin Green, John Warila, Alan Fern, Jonathan Hurst |
RSS 2021 | 🔴 |
| Helei Duan | "Sim-to-Real Learning of
Footstep-Constrained Bipedal Dynamic Walking" Helei Duan, Ashish Malik, Jeremy Dao, Aseem Saxena, Kevin Green, Jonah Siekmann, Alan Fern, Jonathan Hurst |
ICRA 2022 | 🔴 |
| Jonathan Tremblay | "Single-stage Keypoint-based Category-level Object Pose Estimation from an RGB Image" Yunzhi Lin, Jonathan Tremblay, Stephen Tyree, Patricio A. Vela, Stan Birchfield |
ICRA 2022 | 🔴 |
| Ekta Samani | "Visual Object Recognition in Indoor
Environments Using Topologically Persistent
Features" Ekta Samani, Xingjian Yang, Ashis Banerjee |
RA-L 2021 | 🔴 |
| John Morrow | "Benchmarking a Robot Hand's Ability to Translate Objects Using Two
Fingers" John Morrow, Joshua Campbell, Ravi Balasubramanian, Cindy Grimm |
RA-L 2021 | 🔴 |
| Yash Talwekar | "Towards Sensor Autonomy in Sub-Gram Flying Insect Robots: A Lightweight and
Power-Efficient Avionics System" Yash P. Talwekar, Andrew Adie, Vikram Iyer, Sawyer B. Fuller |
ICRA 2022 | ❌ |
| Daksh Dhingra | "A Device for Rapid, Automated Trimming of Insect-Sized Flying Robots" Daksh Dhingra, Yogesh Chukewad, Sawyer B. Fuller |
ICRA 2020 | 🔴 |
| Anisha Bontula | "Comparing the Perception of
Vibrotactile Feedback across Frequency and Body Location" Ryan Quick, Anisha Bontula, Naomi T. Fitter |
IEEE Haptics Symposium 2022 | 🔴 |
Poster session (15 posters)
| Yana Sosnovskaya | "Sensor Fusion for Force and Position Calibration of a Motorized Surgical Smart Grasper" J. Kaplan, Y. Sosnovskaya, M. Arnold, B. Hannaford |
ISMR 2021 | |
| Nigel Swenson | "Improving Grasp Classification through Spatial Metrics Available from
Sensors" Nigel Swenson, Garrett Scott, Peter Bloch, Paresh Soni, Nuha Nishat, Anjali Asar, Cindy Grimm, Xiaoli Fern, Ravi Balasubramanian |
ICRA 2021 | |
| John Morrow | "Measuring a Robot Hand's Potential Graspable Region across its Actuation Space" John Morrow, Joshua Campbell, Kyle Dufrene, Nuha Nishat, Ravi Balasubramanian, Cindy Grimm |
||
| Brian Hou | "Posterior Sampling for Anytime Motion Planning on Graphs with Expensive-to-Evaluate
Edges" Brian Hou, Sanjiban Choudhury, Gilwoo Lee, Aditya Mandalika, Siddhartha S. Srinivasa |
ICRA 2020 | |
| Ian Good | "Expanding the Design Space for
Electrically-Driven Soft Robots Through Handed Shearing
Auxetics" Ian Good, Tosh Brown-Moore, Aditya Patil, Daniel Revier, Jeffrey Ian Lipton |
ICRA 2022 | |
| Benjamin Wong | "Human-Assisted Robotic Detection of Foreign Object Debris Inside Confined
Spaces" Benjamin Wong, Wade Marquette, Nikolay Bykov, Tyler M. Paine, Ashis G. Banerje |
||
| Vinitha Ranganeni & Kavi Dey | "Accessible Remote Teleoperation Interfaces for Assistive Robots" Vinitha Ranganeni, Kavi Dey, Nick Walker, Maya Cakmak |
||
| Rhian C. Preston | "Going out on a Limb: Examining How Form Impacts Human Perception of Robot
Arms" Rhian C. Preston, Nisha Raghunath, Naomi T. Fitter |
HRI Workshop 2022 | |
| Eric Liu | "Read the Room: Adapting a Robot's Voice to Ambient and Social Contexts" Emma Hughson, Paige Tuttösí, Akihiro Matsufuji, Angelica Lim |
||
| Carson Gray | "A robot walks into a bar: Automatic robot joke success assessment" Ajitesh Srivatsava, Naomi T. Fitter |
ICRA 2021 | |
| William Agnew | "Robots Physically Amplify Malignant Stereotypes" Andrew Hundt, William Agnew, Vicky Zeng, Severin Kacianka, Matthew Gombolay |
FAccT 2022 | |
| Shuang Ma | "Looking through inter-frame changes: Learning video representations with dense motion
correspondences" Weijian Xu, Shuang Ma, Yale Song, Daniel Mcduff, Rogerio Bonatti , Sai Vemprala, Chunyuan Li, Jianwei Yang, Vibhav Vineet, Ratnesh Madaan, Ashish Kapoor |
ECCV 2022 | |
| Sai Vemprala | "Learning to Simulate Realistic LiDARs" Benoit Guillard, Sai Vemprala, Jayesh Gupta, Ondrej Miksik, Vibhav Vineet, Pascal Fua, Ashish Kapoor |
||
| Albert Wang & Dylan Sun | "Target Tracking Under Delayed and Irregularly-Sampled Visual Feedback for a Robotic
Air-Hockey System" Hui Xiao, Xu Chen, Albert Wang, Dylan Sun |
ACC 2022 | |
| Fangzhou Yu | "Potato Guided Learning of Aperiodic Trajectories for Cassie" Fangzhou Yu, Ryan Batke, Kevin Green, Jeremy Dao |
Venue
The Bill & Melinda Gates Center for Computer Science & Engineering
University of Washington
The Symposium will take place in the Gates Center's events space and patio, Zillow Commons. Enter from Stevens Way then follow signs to take the elevator to the fourth floor.
Weather
Forecasts call for cloudy to overcast conditions throughout Friday with a high of 58°F. Pack a jacket so that you can comfortably enjoy the view of Lake Washington from the rooftop patio.
Transportation
The Gates Center is easy to access via transit and is just a five minute walk from the University of Washington Link Light Rail stop, which provides service to Sea-Tac airport. The University has instructions on driving and where to park. We recommend the self-service E lots along the nearby athletic facilities which are reachable with a short walk along the Burke Gilman Trail.
Wi-fi
If you are visiting from an eduroam institution, you will be able to connect on campus already. Otherwise, join University of Washington with:
- UW NetID:
event0429 - Password:
E3h7+R5n9+F2a2
Health Guidelines
Per the University of Washington's current guidelines, "wearing a well-fitted, high-quality mask indoors (e.g., KN95, N95, KF94 and surgical masks)" is strongly recommended. If you have symptoms of any respiratory infection, do not attend the symposium. The event space is connected to a rooftop patio and there is abundant seating around the Gates Center so you can easily eat outdoors if you prefer.
Instructions for Presenters
All presenters have been contacted with the format of their presentation and with instructions on how to prepare.
Posters
We will have 32x40 poster boards (which you can orient either way) and clips for you. If you are preparing a fresh poster, we recommend a size of 24x36. If you are bringing an existing poster that’s larger than our poster boards, let us know so we can plan to accommodate it. We encourage you to set up your poster during the check-in period so that attendees can look at them throughout the event.
Talks
Please prepare for an 8-minute presentation, with 2 additional minutes for questions. We intend to have a single machine hooked up the projector in the event space which we will ask you to load your slides onto before the start of the session.
Calls for Presentations
April 22nd, 2022
This inaugural symposium aims to make up for two-plus years of missed in-person networking as a result of the pandemic. Students, postdocs, industry researchers, and faculty are all encouraged to participate. The event is free.
The symposium will be an all-day affair featuring invited short talks, posters, and social events. The original deadline for application to present a talk or poster was April 13th, and participants have been notified of their presentation format. We have space remaining in the poster session, so we will continue to welcome submissions until a week before the event, or until we run out space. Due to participant demand, we will also welcome unpublished work in the session.
If you do not have anything to present but you are still interested in attending the event, please fill out the registration form.
We look forward to reuniting our community this spring.
March 13th, 2022
This inaugural symposium aims to make up for two-plus years of missed in-person networking as a result of the pandemic. Students, postdocs, industry researchers, and faculty are all encouraged to participate. The event is free.
The symposium will be an all-day affair featuring invited short talks, posters, and social events. If you have a paper published in one of the recent virtual robotics conferences (ICRA, IROS, RSS, HRI, CoRL, others) please consider submitting to our Call for Presentations by filling out the form. The deadline for submissions is April 13, 2022. We will let you know shortly after whether your paper will be presented as a short talk (10-15 minutes) or as a poster.
If you do not have anything to present but you are still interested in attending the event, please fill out the registration form.
We look forward to reuniting our community this spring.
Organizers
- Nick Walker, University of Washington
- Karthik Desingh, University of Washington
- Maya Cakmak, University of Washington
- Sawyer Fuller, University of Washington
- Josh Smith, University of Washington
This event would not be possible without the efforts of Emma Notkin, Research Events Coordinator, and the Paul G. Allen School production team.
Contact the organizers at nwrsymposium@pm.me.