To compete in The BARN Challenge, Designing autonomous robot navigation systems has been each participating team needed to develop an entire software a topic of interest to the robotics community for decades [1]- stack for navigation for a standardized and provided mobile [5]. Indeed, there currently exist many such systems that robot. In particular, the competition provided a Clearpath allow robots to move from one point to another in a collisionfree Jackal [26] with a 2D 270 -field-of-view Hokuyo LiDAR manner (e.g., open-source implementations in the Robot for perception and a differential drive system with 2m/s Operating System (ROS) [4]-[6] with extensions to different maximum speed for actuation. The aim of each team was to vehicle types [7]), which may create the perception that develop navigation software stack needed to autonomously autonomous ground navigation is a solved problem. This drive the robot from a given starting location through a dense perception may be reinforced by the fact that many mobile obstacle filed and to a given goal, and to accomplish this task robot researchers have moved on to orthogonal navigation without any collisions with obstacles or any human interventions.

We spoke to the exhibitors to get real-life demos of their products. Tangram Vision is a hardware-agnostic sensor fusion platform. Their co-founder, Adam Rodnitzky, walks us through their sensor fusion platform. Matt Bilsky, Founder and CEO of FLX Solutions gives us a live demo of their robot, the FLX BOT. Matt Bilsky applied his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering to create a novel, highly compact robot that is designed to reach and inspect parts of a building that a human cannot reach.

As one of the ICRA Science Communication Award Winner, I covered the virtual aspects of ICRA 2022. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2022 is absolutely the best robotics conference. It generally covers a vast range of robotics including but not limited to perception, control, optimization, machine learning and application-robotics. In 2022, ICRA was held in Philadelphia, where the U.S. declaration of independence was signed, for a week from May, 23rd to May, 27th. This conference is also one of the first in-person conferences for roboticists after a couple of pandemic years.

This year 2022 has been the first time that I have attended ICRA, and I had never even remotely expected that it was going to be such an intense and exciting experience for me. Before starting the conference, I believed that what would interest me the most would be the state-of-the-art robots that are showcased during the conference. I am a researcher in swarm robotics, and I typically work with small educational robots. To me, the ICRA 2022 Science Communication Awards seemed a great opportunity to experience the large ecosystem of robots presented in the exhibitions and the competitions. Since I was not presenting any paper, getting to see amazing robots resulted very intriguing.

The 39th edition of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) took place at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia (USA) and online May 23-27. ICRA 2022 brought together the world's top researchers and companies to share ideas and advances in the fields of robotics and automation. Nearly 8,000 participants from academia and industry, including 4700 in person, from a total of 97 countries, joined the largest conference in robotics. Indeed, these figures reflect the evolution of the field in the last 34 years, with the last ICRA in Philadelphia (1988) only welcoming around 300 participants and a few exhibitors. "We were thrilled to see the robotics community respond so positively to the first in-person ICRA conference since the pandemic started," ICRA 2022 General Co-Chair George J. Pappas (University of Pennsylvania) commented.

This year 2022 has been the first time that I have attended ICRA, and I had never even remotely expected that it was going to be such an intense and exciting experience for me. Before starting the conference, I believed that what would interest me the most would be the state-of-the-art robots that are showcased during the conference. I am a researcher in swarm robotics, and I typically work with small educational robots. To me, the ICRA 2022 Science Communication Awards seemed a great opportunity to experience the large ecosystem of robots presented in the exhibitions and the competitions. Since I was not presenting any paper, getting to see amazing robots resulted very intriguing.

Attending ICRA is a great opportunity to see many state-of-the-art (and famous?) robots in a single venue. Indeed, a quick trip to the exhibitors' booths is enough to get introduced to the large and diverse group of commercial robots we have today. Yet, one can easily notice that these amazing state-of-the-art robots do not interact with each other. At least they do not do it without human mediation. Although in the exhibitions one can find two or three robots that appear to be joyfully playing together, the reality is that their operators are creating these inter-robot interactions.

Every year, ICRA gathers an astonishing number of robot makers. With a quick look at the exhibitors, one can already perceive the immense creativity and inventiveness that creators put in their robots. To my eyes, creating a robot is an art: how does a robot should look like? What would it be good for? Should we go for legs or wheels?

The IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), taking place simultaneously at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia and virtually, has just kicked off. ICRA 2022 brings together the world's top researchers and most important companies to share ideas and advances in the fields of robotics and automation. This is the first time the ICRA community is reunited after the pandemic, resulting in record breaking attendance with over 7,000 registrations and 95 countries represented. As the ICRA 2022 Co-Chair Vijay Kumar (University of Pennsylvania, USA) states, "we could not be happier to host the largest robotics conference in the world in Philadelphia, and the beginning of the re-emergence from the pandemic after a three year hiatus. Many important developments in robotics and automation have historically been first presented at ICRA, and in its 39th year, ICRA 2022 promises to take this trend one step further.