July 2017 - RoboCup-athome - lists.robocup.org

Call for Proposals: RoboCup@Home Domestic Standard Platform User Teams
by Komei Sugiura 21 Jul '17

21 Jul '17

Dear all, The RoboCup@Home league aims to develop service and assistive robot technology with high relevance for future personal domestic applications [ http://www.robocupathome.org/ ]. RoboCup@Home Domestic Standard Platform League (RoboCup@Home DSPL) is part of RoboCup@Home, and is a competition of standard platform robots. To participate in RoboCup@Home DSPL, you are required to have the standard platform, Toyota Human Support Robot (HSR). We invite teams of highly motivated researchers/engineers/students who will participate in RoboCup 2018 Montreal, to apply for the HSR robot. If you are interested, please consider to visit the RoboCup 2017 Nagoya or check free live video streams of RoboCup@Home DSPL at the following URL. https://www.robocup2017.org/eng/index.html ## 0. Conditions: HSR Up to 12 user teams will be selected. The HSR will be leased as a part of Joint Research. The Joint Researcher may need to bear annual cost sharing with amount of 1.2 million Japanese Yen approximately. Depending on the option of contract, annual cost may not be charged for one year. If the user team participates in RoboCup 2018 and meets certain conditions, the same option may be applied for another year. For detailed conditions, visit [ http://www.robocupathome.org/athome-spl/hsr_condition18 ] ## 1. How to obtain a Standard Platform ## 1.1 Proposal submission Proposals should be sent to the Selection Committee as follows. The Proposals are evaluated through peer-review process. To: spl-sc(a)robocupathome.org Subject: [@Home-DSPL] (YourTeamName) Body: (Please fill in the following basic information) === 1. Team Name: 2. Country: 3. Affiliation: 4. Team Leader Name: 5. Contact information (E-mail): 6. Link to a team web site: 7. Proposal as an attachment file === ### 1.2 Additional notes on Proposals * The Proposal must be submitted in a pdf format * The size of the Proposal is limited to _6MB_ * A team can apply for only one platform. If identical Proposals are submitted to apply for both platforms, they are automatically rejected. ## 2. Deadline for Proposal submissions Sep. 30, 2017 23:59 PST ## 3. Instructions for the Website The information to be placed on the website should include the following: * Team members * Description of the approaches and information on scientific achievements * Relevant publications (last 5 years, preferably with links for download) * Relevant photos/videos that show the skills of the team * Link to repositories with software for the community (optional) * Previous participation in RoboCup (optional) ## 4. Instructions for the Proposal The Proposal must be based on the official league Team Description Paper (TDP) template. It should be in a pdf format and must contain the following information: * Description of the approach planned to be implemented on the robot * List of externally available components that are planned to be implemented - Open source software, web services, etc. * Innovative technology and scientific contribution * Focus of research/research interests * Re-usability of the system for other research groups * Applicability of the approach in the real world The Proposal should go into detail about the technical and scientific approach, but the website should be designed for a broader audience. The length of the Proposal is limited to 6 pages. Please use the same Springer LNAI format used in the RoboCup Symposium submissions. No change in margins, paragraphs and font size are allowed. http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0 You may download the template from https://github.com/RoboCupAtHome/TDPTemplate.git ## 5. Evaluation criteria The Proposals will be judged by the following criteria: * Proposal - Clarity, scientific contributions, re-usability by the league, applicability in real world * Website - Multimedia, publications from past 5 years, downloadable content, open-source software and other contributions * Relevant scientific publications * Open-source software ## 6. Contact Please send any questions to: spl-sc(a)robocupathome.org ## 7. Important notes * The suppliers are not allowed to sell, export, lease and/or ship their products to natural or legal persons and to entities and countries which are subject to international sanctions or prohibitions. Since Selection Committee cannot answer this issue, please ask the supplier directly. - The contact email address about Toyota HSR: xr-hsr-info(a)mail.toyota.co.jp * Being selected as a user team does not mean that the team is qualified to participate in RoboCup 2018 Montreal. Team qualification will be separately conducted in February 2018. * After selected as a Standard Platform user team, the team has to make an agreement with the supplier in compliance with the supplier's instructions. Best Regards, Komei Sugiura, Luca Iocchi, Caleb Rascon, Kai Chen, Sven Wachsmuth RoboCup@Home Standard Platform League Selection Committee.

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Trustee/Press/VIP tours
by Komei Sugiura 20 Jul '17

20 Jul '17

Hi all, We have the following important tours to @Home. Some teams might be asked to make demos. - July 25 17:00-19:10 Trustee tour - July 26 11:00-12:00 Press tour - July 27 10:00-12:00 VIP tour - July 28 14:30-16:00 VIP visit Best, Komei

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[meetings] CALL for posters to IROS 2017 Workshop: Semantic Policy and Action Representations for Autonomous Robots (SPAR)
by Karinne Ramirez Amaro 17 Jul '17

17 Jul '17

********************************************************************************************** ****2nd Workshop on Semantic Policy and Action Representations for Autonomous Robots (SPAR)*** ********************************************************************************************** ----Call for Posters and Demonstrations--- We are calling for contributions to our IROS 2017 workshop. We would like to invite the attendees of this workshop to submit an extended abstract explaining their current work or developed systems in the areas of reasoning, perception, control, planning, and learning applied to robotic systems. This workshop is intended for roboticists interested in improving the reliability and autonomy of robots. We hope to bring together outstanding researchers and graduate students to discuss current trends, problems, and opportunities in semantic action (policy) representations, encouraging communication and common practices such as sharing datasets among scientists in this field. *** Important Dates ***: Paper submission deadline: 25th July 2017 Notification of acceptance: 15th August 2017 Camera ready submission: 1st September 2017 Workshop day: 24th September 2017 *** Call for contributions *** We encourage 1-2 pages extended abstract of relevant work that has been previously published, or is to be presented at the main conference. The accepted abstracts will be posted on the workshop website in a compiled yearbook and will not appear in the official IEEE proceedings. Furthermore, we particularly call for live demonstrations to be presented on the workshop day. We encourage researchers as well as companies (both hardware and software companies) to contribute to the workshop. The reviewing is single blind and will be carried out by the workshop chairs. Please submit your abstract to the workshop official email address <spar.workshop(a)gmail.com> before July 25, 2017. The accepted demonstrations can show their systems and its benefits to a broader audience. The accepted papers will have the opportunity to present their work/ideas in a poster session. Two selective submissions will give a 15 min talk at the workshop. Please indicate in your email if you want to present as a poster, oral, and/or live demonstration. Furthermore, a selective number of papers from the poster sessions will be invited to submit their novel work to the Special Issue we are proposing in the journal “Robotics and Autonomous Systems”. This special issue will cover the main topics of interest of this workshop. ***Workshop URL*** https://www.ics.ei.tum.de/workshop-iros-spar17/ Contact email: spar.workshop(a)gmail.com *** Workshop objectives *** The aim of this one-day workshop is two-fold. First, we intend to highlight to the robotics community the recent developments in semantic reasoning representations and semantic policy generation from low level (sensory signal) to high level (planning and execution). More importantly, we want to reconcile and integrate various bottom-up and top-down approaches for semantic action perception and executions in different domains. Second, we are aiming to compare various state-of-the-art approaches for generic action and reasoning representations in both computer vision and robotic communities, looking for a common ground to combine assumedly different approaches for autonomous capability and reliability. For this, we would like to propose and define different data sets that could be potentially used as benchmarks to compare the presented methods. We would like to take advantage of the recent efforts that some laboratories took by making their testing data sets publicly available. In addition, we would like to encourage this best practice to the participants of this workshop. This workshop will present the main benefits of this new emerging type of methods such as allowing robots to learn generalized semantic models for different domains. We will also like to discuss the next breakthrough topics in this area, e.g. the scalability of the learned models that can adapt to new scenarios/domains in a way that the robot can transfer all the acquired knowledge and experience from existing data to new domains with very little human intervention. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: *AI-Based Methods --Learning and adaptive systems & Probability and statistical methods --Action grammars/libraries & Spatiotemporal event encoding --Machine learning techniques for semantic representations *Reasoning Methods in Robotics and Automation --Signal to symbol transition (Symbol grounding) & Different levels of abstraction --Semantics of manipulation actions & Semantic policy representation --Context modeling methods *Human Behavior Recognition --Learning from demonstration & Object-action relations --Bottom-up and top-down perception *Task, Geometric, and Dynamic Level Plans and Policies --PDDL high-level planning & Task and motion planning methods *Human-Robot interaction --Prediction of human intentions & Linking linguistic and visual data *** Invited Speakers *** (in alphabetical order, all confirmed) 1) Yiannis Aloimonos University of Maryland, USA 2) Tamim Asfour Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany 3) Heni Ben Amor Arizona State University, USA 4) Gordon Cheng Technische Universität München, Germany 5) Gregory D. Hager, Johns Hopkins University, USA 6) Tetsunari Inamura, National Institute of Informatics, Japan 7) Lydia E. Kavraki, Rice University, USA 8) Manuela M. Veloso, Carnegie Mellon University, USA *** Organizers *** Karinne Ramirez-Amaro, Technical University of Munich, https://www.ics.ei.tum.de/people/ramirez Yezhou Yang, Arizona State University, USA, https://yezhouyang.engineering.asu.edu Neil T. Dantam, Rice University, http://www.neil.dantam.name Eren Erdal Aksoy, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, http://h2t.anthropomatik.kit.edu/english/21_947.php Gordon Cheng, Technical University of Munich, https://www.ics.ei.tum.de/en/people/cheng -- Dr.-Ing. Karinne Ramirez Amaro Institute for Cognitive Systems Technische Universitaet Muenchen Address: Karlstr. 45, 2.OG. 80333 Munich, Germany Room: 2008 Web page: http://web.ics.ei.tum.de/~karinne/Ramirez/index.html email: karinne.ramirez(a)tum.de Telephone: +49-89-289-26791

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PARTICIPATION: IJCAI 2017 HUMAN-ROBOT ENGAGEMENT
by Mary-Anne Williams 15 Jul '17

15 Jul '17

=================================================================== *IJCAI 2017 **WORKSHOP* *HUMAN-ROBOT ENGAGEMENT in the Home, Workplace and Public Spaces * =================================================================== 26th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence <http://ijcai-17.org/> Melbourne, Australia * Workshop Date: Saturday August 19, 2017* *Venue: RMIT, *124 La Trobe St, Melbourne VIC 3000 *{INVITED SPEAKERS}* *Professor Holly Yanco* Founder of the Robotics Lab; Director New England Robotics Validation and Experimentation (NERVE), University of Massachusetts Lowell USA *Dr Amit K Pandey* Head Principal Scientist (Chief Scientist); Scientific Coordinator - Collaborative Projects, SoftBank Robotics, Paris, France *{ABOUT}* Social robots are poised to have a profound impact on business, society and the global economy. They are a disruptive technology. A self-driving vehicle is an example of a social robot, not only does it need to drive on the road safely but it must also create enjoyable experiences for humans inside the vehicle, while at the same time communicating with and anticipating nearby cars, pedestrians, city infrastructure, land and space based technologies. The key to success of any social robot is how well it can engage people around it as it pursues its design goals. The critical research question is how can we design social robots to enhance the human experience and improve people's lives? The purpose of this workshop is to explore how social robots can generate value and create engaging experiences for people in the home, workplace and public spaces. The workshop will focus on social robots in the home, workplace and public spaces. Robot encounters in public spaces will be different to those in workplaces where a robot is a long-term partner and expected to help humans be more productive. The key research challenges are autonomy, proactivity and intelligence, sociability. Social robotics is a field involving several disciplines. We seek to bring together research interests that are not traditionally 'close'. In particular, the workshop will provide a venue for fruitful discussion between artificial intelligence researchers exploring pervasive computing, social robotics, cognitive science, software engineering, law, AI planning and knowledge representation. In addition to presented papers the Workshop will involve practical Design Thinking session and much lively discussion and debate on the applications and implications of social robotics. Relevant topics include, but are not limited, to the following: - Human-robot interaction and collaboration - Social intelligence for proactive autonomous robots - Law abiding autonomous robots - Engagement and disengagement in HRI - Human attention, proactive decision making and behaviour - Autonomy, learning and intelligence - Joint attention and emotional connection - Social robots in an Internet of Things ecosystem - Privacy and security for Social Robotics - Legal and ethical implications of social robots *{PROGRAM}* The workshop program is now available. <http://ijcaihumanrobotengagement.webnode.com/program/> *{REGISTRATION}* Registration detail at the IJCAI website <https://ijcai-17.org/registration.html>. *{ORGANIZING COMMITTEE}* * Mary-Anne Williams*, University of Technology Sydney and CodeX Stanford University (Chair) * Benjamin Johnston*, University of Technology Sydney * William Judge*, Commonwealth Bank of Australia * Amit Kumar Pandey*, Softbank Robotics Europe * Meg Tonkin*, University of Technology Sydney *Jonathan Vitale,* University of Technology Sydney *{PROGRAM COMMITTEE}* * Nic Carey*, Harvard University, USA * Xiaoping Chen*, University of Science and Technology of China * Jesse Clark,* University of Technology Sydney, Australia * Tony Cohn*, Leeds University, UK * Kate Darling*, MIT, USA * Peter Gärdenfors*, Lund University, Sweden * Georg Gottlob*, Oxford University, UK * Daniel Grollman*, Sphero, USA * Michael Genesereth*, CodeX and the Dept of Computer Science, Stanford University, USA * Hatice Gunes*, University of Cambridge, UK * George Konidaris*, Brown University, USA * Eryk Korfel*, Commonwealth Bank of Australia * Mahya Knox*, University of Technology Sydney, Australia * Séverin Lemaignan*, University of Plymouth, UK * William Mailer*, Commonwealth Bank of Australia * Lilia Moshkina*, Neato Robotics, USA * Yukie Naga*i, Osaka University, Japan * Bernhard Nebel*, University of Freiburg, Germany * Suman Ojha*, University of Technology Sydney, Australia * David Parkes*, Harvard University, USA * Pavlos Peppas*, Patras University, Greece * Sammy Pfeiffer*, University of Technology Sydney, Australia * Brian Scassellati*, Yale University, USA * Julie Shah*, MIT, USA *Harry Surden,* University of Colorado and Stanford University, USA *Manuela Veloso*, Carnegie Mellon University, USA *Roland Vogl*, CodeX and the Law School, Stanford University, USA *Holly Yanco*, UMass Lowell, USA *Xun Wang*, University of Technology Sydney and Commonwealth Bank of Australia Workshop Website: http://ijcaihumanrobotengagement.webnode.com *Mary-Anne Williams <http://mary-annewilliams.com/>* *Distinguished Professor* *Director, Disruptive Innovation* Office of the Provost and Senior Vice President University of Technology Sydney (UTS) Founder and Director, Innovation and Enterprise Research Lab <http://themagiclab.org/> (The Magic Lab) Fellow, Stanford University <https://law.stanford.edu/directory/mary-anne-williams/> Twitter: @SwizzleFish <https://twitter.com/swizzlefish>

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Wifi guidelines in Nagoya
by Komei Sugiura 12 Jul '17

12 Jul '17

Dear all, Wifi guidelines are updated. https://robocup2017.org/file/RoboCup2017_WirelessGuideline_0712.pdf Regards, Komei

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[jobs] Robotics PhD positions in Groningen, for candidates outside the Netherlands
by Wolf, B.J. 10 Jul '17

10 Jul '17

Dear list members, Several new fully funded PhD positions available in the Data Science & Systems Complexity programme at the Faculty of Science and Engineering at the University of Groningen. The projects entitled `The value of data' and `Home robotics' will be supervised by Bart Verheij and myself, together with Ernst Wit and Ming Cao, respectively. If you are interested in artificial intelligence, logic, probability theory, argumentation, data analysis or robotics, don't hesitate to apply! If you have questions, do get in touch with: l.c.verbrugge(a)rug.nl b.verheij(a)rug.nl Information about the two projects: The value of data: http://www.rug.nl/research/fse/themes/dssc/cofund/ training/#project-4-the-value-of-data Home robotics: http://www.rug.nl/research/fse/themes/dssc/cofund/ training/#project-13-home-robotics There is also a project co-supervised by Marieke van Vugt: http://www.rug.nl/research/fse/themes/dssc/cofund/training/#project-7- understanding-the-complex-system-of-the-brain …and a project co-supervised by Marco Wiering and Lambert Schomaker: http://www.rug.nl/research/fse/themes/dssc/cofund/training/#project-2- dimensionality-reduction-for-huge-classification-problems Information about application: http://www.rug.nl/research/fse/themes/dssc/cofund/application/ Please note the following: - In your motivation letter, you should apply for a specific project or projects. - There are restrictions: you should not have resided or carried out your main activity in The Netherlands for more than 12 months in the three years before July 15, 2017 (the deadline for application). Best wishes, Ben Wolf team leader Team Borg, University of Groningen

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FYI: Number of registered teams and participants
by Komei Sugiura 04 Jul '17

04 Jul '17

Dear @Home teams/EC/TC/OC, The followings are the numbers of registered @Home teams/participants as of June 30. OPL 15 teams, 166 participants DSPL 10 teams, 76 participants SSPL 7 teams, 46 participants I'm looking forward to seeing you in Nagoya! Regards, Komei -- ***************************************************************** Komei Sugiura, Ph.D. Senior Researcher, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology 3-5 Hikaridai, Seika, Soraku, Kyoto 619-0289, Japan Email: komei.sugiura(a)nict.go.jp URL: http://komeisugiura.jp/index_en.html *****************************************************************

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IEEEì RO_MAN Workshop - HRI for Service Robots in RoboCup@Home
by Luca Iocchi 03 Jul '17

03 Jul '17

Dear RoboCup@Home teams, please consider participation to this workshop that has been organized by the IEEE Technical Committee on RoboCup. Best regards, Luca. ==================================================================================================== HRI for Service Robots in RoboCup@Home Workshop of the IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (IEEE RO-MAN 2017) Lisbon, Portugal, September 1st, 2017 (half day workshop). http://www.diag.uniroma1.it/~labrococo/hri-for-service-robots/ The aim of this workshop (which is organized by the IEEE TC on RoboCup) is to present the challenges and technical developments addressed by RoboCup@Home to the research community in Human-Robot Interaction and to acquire feedback on the technical challenges in HRI, to be pursued through robotic competitions for benchmarking the performances of Service Robots. The workshop is especially timely, as RoboCup@Home has just launched the standard platform league by selecting two platforms, namely the Softbank Pepper and the HR Toyota Robots. The adoption of standard platforms can be beneficial in several respects. On one hand it will make the competition framework more accessible to the researchers in HRI as the standard platform allows to focus on the HRI development, by exploiting exhaustive solutions for the basic functions. On the other hand, the use of a standard platform allows for a more specialized setting for benchmarking and comparison of the results of experiments aiming at assessing manifold design choices in HRI. In this respect, the workshop will also provide a forum to discuss the approach to benchmarking in other competitions, in particular the European Robotics League on Service Robotics (ESR-RL). The technical programme of the workshop will include: -- a session of technical contributions; -- a panel discussion focused on the HRI challenges that are currently developed in the competition and can be added to the competition. We solicite contributions to the panel discussion in the form of a position paper of 2 pages to be mailed at capobianco(a)dis.uniroma1.it by July 20^th . The earlier, the better. We will send acceptance notifications and make the final programme available shortly afterwords. Confirmed speakers: Manuela Veloso (CMU, Pittsburg), Pedro Lima (IST, Lisbon), Francesco Ferro (Pal Robotics), Amit Kumar Pandey (Softbank Robotics),Winners of RoboCup 2017, Participants of ERL event at IEEE Ro-Man. Keywords: Gesture, Sound, Non-verbal communication, Facial expressions, Joint Actions, Behaviour Recognition, Proxemics, Spoken Language Interaction, Human Robot Dialogues, Social navigation, Social rules, HRI Testing, Performance Evaluation, Benchmarking. Organizing Committee; Daniele Nardi (Sapienza Univ. Roma), Minoru Asada ( Osaka University, Japan), Daniel Lee (Univ. Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA), Manuela Veloso (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA), Pedro Lima (Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisbon, Portugal)

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Two bachelor theses Social Standard Platform League
by Visser, Arnoud 03 Jul '17

03 Jul '17

Dear all, this weekend two of our students finished their theses inspired by the challenges of the Social Standard Platform League. Because 2017 is the first year that the Social Standard Platform League is organized, the number of publications is still limited, so I thought that this work could be of interest to the community: * Jonathan Gerbscheid, People detection on the Pepper robot using Convolutional Neural Networks and 3D blob detection<https://staff.fnwi.uva.nl/a.visser/research/athome/JonathanGerbscheidBachel…>, Bachelor thesis, Universiteit van Amsterdam, July 2017. * Tirza Soute, Discovering Available Drinks through Natural, Robot-Led, Human-Robot Interaction between a Waiter and a Bartender<https://staff.fnwi.uva.nl/a.visser/research/athome/TirzaSouteBachelorThesis…>, Bachelor thesis, Universiteit van Amsterdam, July 2017. Regards, Arnoud Visser on behalf of the UvA@Home team https://staff.fnwi.uva.nl/a.visser/research/athome/

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