How do people communicate when they are underwater? Marine environments present a unique set of challenges that render several technologies that were developed for land applications completely useless. Communicating using sound, or at least as people use sound to communicate, is one of them. Michael Fulton tackles this challenge with his presentation at ICRA 2022 by using body language to communicate with an AUV underwater. His poster can be viewed here.

How can robots learn to interact with and reason about themselves and the world without an intuitive feel for either? Communication is at the heart of biological and robotic systems. Inspired by control theory, information theory, and neuroscience, early work in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics focused on a class of dynamical system known as feedback systems. These systems are characterized by recurrent mechanisms or feedback loops that govern, regulate, or'steer' the behaviour of the system toward desirable stable states in the presence of disturbance in diverse environments. Feedback between sensation, prediction, decision, action, and back is a critical component of sensorimotor learning needed to realize robust intelligent robotic systems in the wild, a grand challenge of the field. Existing robots are fundamentally numb to the world, limiting their ability to sense themselves and their environment. This problem will only increase as robots grow in complexity, dexterity, and maneuverability, guided by biomimicry. Feedback control systems such as the proportional integral derivative (PID), reinforcement learning (RL), and model predictive control (MPC) are now common in robotics, as is (optimal, Bayesian) Kálmán filtering of point-based IMU-GPS signals. Lacking are the distributed multi-modal, high-dimensional sensations needed to realize general intelligent behaviour, executing complex action sequences through high-level abstractions built up from an intuitive feel or understanding of physics.While the central nervous system and biological neural networks are quantum parallel distributed processing (PDP) engines, most digital artificial neural networks are fully decoupled from sensors and provide only a passive image of the world. We are working to change that by coupling parallel distributed sensing and data processing through a neural paradigm. This involves innovations in hardware, software, and datasets. At Nervosys, we aim to make this dream a reality by building the first nervous system and platform for general robotic intelligence.

Communicating innovation: What can we do better? The question on what role communications play in forming the perception of innovative technology was discussed in this workshop. Experts explained how the innovation uptake should be supported by effective communication of innovations: explaining the benefits, tackling risks and fears of the audiences, and taking innovation closer to the general public.

Dr. Sihao Sun discusses his award-winning research in the area of controlling the flight of a drone when faced with a sudden rotor failure. Typical research in this area addressed the case where one of the four rotors in a quadrotor suddenly, spontaneously stops working. This previous research does not take into full account real-life scenarios where rotor failure is common. This includes collisions with other drones, walls, birds, and operating in degraded GPS environments. Dr. Sihao Sun is a postdoctoral research assistant at the Robotics and Perception Group (RPG) in University of Zurich directed by Prof. Davide Scaramuzza.

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.

The IEEE International Conference on Automation and Robotics, ICRA, is the itinerant flagship conference of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, RAS. In its 39th edition, ICRA is being held in the Pennsylvania Convention Center, in Philadelphia, PA, USA, between May 23 and 27, 2022. ICRA started just after the birth of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (formerly IEEE Robotics and Automation Council) in 1983. The first edition was held in Atlanta, GA, USA, in 1984. During its first years, the conference showed the growing interest of researchers and industry leaders in the emergent field of robotics.

The 2021 Swiss Robotics Day marked the beginning of NCCR Robotics's final year. The project, launched in 2010, is on track to meet all its scientific goals in the three areas of wearable, rescue and educational robotics, while continuing to focus on supporting spin-offs, advancing robotics education and improving equality of opportunities for all robotics researchers.

I believe that one of the best ways to get the training you need for a job market in robotics is to attend tutorials at conferences like ICRA. Unlike workshops where you might listen to some work-in-progress, other workshop paper presentations and panel discussions, tutorials are exactly what they sound like. They aim to give you some hands-on learning sessions on technical tools/skills with specific learning objectives. As such, most tutorials would expect you to come prepared to actively participate and follow along. For instance, the "Tools for Robotic Reinforcement Learning" tutorial expects you to come knowing how to code in python and have basic knowledge of reinforcement learning because you'll be expected to use those skills/knowledge in the hands-on sessions. There are seven tutorials this year.