The research institutes KIT – Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany), Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt (Austria), Inria (France), University of Tokyo (Japan) and JOANNEUM RESEARCH ROBOTICS (Austria) organized the “2nd Workshop on Proximity Perception in Robotics” at the IROS 2019 – the worldwide well-known IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. As flagship conference in the field of robotics and the biggest international event for researchers, companies and end-users the IROS 2019 took place in Macao (China) from November 4th to November 8th, 2019 with more than 3500 attendees.
The “2nd Workshop on Proximity Perception in Robotics” followed up on the workshop last year at IROS 2018 on this topic. Beyond that, the scope of themes was expanded by bio-inspired robotics and speakers that have started to work in the field more recently, were invited. Therefore, this was an excellent opportunity to further increase the visibility of this field, which is still unknown to many, and to consolidate the community that is being formed around this subject.
The inspiring talks of the invited speakers, Nikolaus Correll (University of Colorado at Boulder), Hansruedi Früh (F&P Robotics AG), Jelizaveta Konstantinova (Ocado Technology), Frédéric Boyer (Ecole des Mines de Nantes), Norbert Druml (Infineon Technologies AG) and Akihiko Yamaguchi (Tohoku University) clearly did highlight the importance of proximity perception for the robotics community. The interactions during the panel discussion made it obvious what the scientific community has to contribute to make the technology more attractive for the industry. One key aspect is to demonstrate the capability of the sensor technology in real industrial use cases.
We are looking forward to continue the workshop series in 2020, future events will be published on the website www.proxelsandtaxels.org. Moreover, you can keep informed by registering on our mailing list www.lists.kit.edu/sympa/subscribe/proximityperception-robotics.