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?

Project OpenDR which PAL Robotics is a project partner in has released a toolkit for deep learning in robotics – one of the first of its kind, that provides over 20 methods for human pose estimation, face detection, face recognition, facial expression recognition, object detection and more. The aim is to enable a wide range of capabilities in robotics more easily using the toolkit. Advances in deep learning have brought about significant developments in technology such as self-driving cars and algorithms that are able to understand and answer questions. However, the application of deep learning in robotics creates challenges in learning, reasoning, and embodiment problems and research questions that are often not addressed by the computer vision and machine learning communities. The team at PAL Robotics will use multiple capabilities developed in the OpenDR toolkit on the TIAGo robot.

RO-MAN 2021 (IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication) is coming soon, from 8 to 12 August 2021, and we are taking part in the conference once again, this year as silver sponsors. RO-MAN 2021 (this year taking place virtually) is a key event in the community of Robot & Human technologies, which we at PAL Robotics are committed to contributing to. RO-MAN this year celebrates its 30th anniversary. This annual academic conference was launched in 1992 in Tokyo, Japan and is sponsored by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. RO-MAN 2021 is being organised by the University of British Columbia and the University of Waterloo, Canada.

Last week we participated in The IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids) as Gold Sponsors. We took part in the workshops'Towards physical-social human-robot interaction,' and'TALOS: Status & Progress', as invited speakers, as well as offering a Virtual Tour of our legged robots including our latest projects, SOLO12 & Kangaroo. The IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots is the internationally recognized prime event of the humanoid robotics community. Established in 2000 and held annually, the Humanoids Conference is a forum for researchers working in the area of humanoid robots including mechatronics, control, perception, planning, learning, human-robot interaction, biomechanics, artificial intelligence, cognition, and neuroscience. Although this year's event took place virtually, PAL Robotics has previously taken part in Humanoids Conferences around the world, including in Toronto, and Beijing in recent years. At the event, we offered a Virtual Tour of all of our legged robots featuring our Humanoids Team: Sai Kishor, Adrià Roig, and Narcis Miguel.

The European Robotics Week 2017 (ERW2017) Central Event organised in Brussels saw the "Robots Discovery" exhibition hosted by the European Committee of the Regions on 20-23 November, where robotics experts from 30 European and regionally-funded projects outlined the impact of their work on society. The exhibiting projects showed robots assisting during surgery or providing support for elderly care, how robots can help students develop digital skills, monitor the environment and apply agricultural chemicals with precision and less waste or how they can save lives after disasters. The #ERW2017 hashtag has reached over 1 million impressions on social media. Here's a look at how the "Robots Discovery" central event was portrayed. Essential to help young people & workers gain the right skills #digitalskills #SocialSummit17.

ICRA, the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, is an annual academic conference covering advances in robotics. It is one of the premier conferences in its field. This year, I was invited to attend to its 2017 edition in Singapore. With a superb organization and a beautiful location, the event included conferences of leading researchers and companies from all around the world, as well as workshops and an exhibitors area. This latter is where I spent most of my time, as I love direct interaction with the companies and research centres.

The European Robotics Forum in Edinburgh late March brought together over 800 people from industry, academia and government. The 3-day event packed it's lot of talks, workshops, and panel discussions. So much to see, meet and listen at #ERF2017 @eu_Robotics pic.twitter.com/b640q25IIK The event kicked off with a dive into deep learning and its applications in robotics with keynotes by Senior Research Scientist at DeepMind Raia Hadsell, CEO of FiveAI Stan Boland, and Member of the Scottish Parliament Keith Brown. The theme of the forum this year was "living and working with robots".

If you are a roboticist and you want to work with humanoids but you don't want to build a robot from scratch, PAL Robotics would be happy to sell you one. The Spanish robot maker is introducing a new option that improves on its REEM humanoids: TALOS is a 32-degrees-of-freedom, 1.75-meter-tall, 100-kilogram robot designed for dynamic walking, heavy lifting, and (eventually) assisting humans with all of those tasks that we really don't want to be doing. PAL Robotics designed TALOS with the intention of having the robot "work on physically demanding and accurate tasks performed under hostile or uncomfortable industrial settings," according to PAL CEO Francesco Ferro. This means that the robot is not just a research platform--it's going to start out in research, as many robots do, but PAL hopes it can transition into doing useful tasks in the real world, a thing that humanoid robots in general aren't known for. Right out of the box (and we assume it's a pretty big box), TALOS can walk at 3 km/h, it can handle traveling over irregular surfaces, and its battery can keep it running for up to 3 hours (depending on what the robot is doing).

This Friday the European Robotics Week begins! Europe will be full of robotics events with more than 500 activities registered, which make sure that robots are the continent's focus. PAL Robotics will be present in Amsterdam, Madrid and Barcelona, where you can meet us and interact with our robots. The ERW2016 Central Event, Robots at your service, is starting today in Amsterdam. Robots at your service is debating about the role of assistant robots in our future and how they can benefit people by taking care of the elderly, ill and disabled people at home.

To obtain his PhD in bio-inspired robotics at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Dr. Jose Berengueres studied the movement of a gecko in order to build a robot. That was the beginning of his exploration into how the real world and robotics could intersect. Since gaining his PhD in 2007, he's worked on robotic projects worldwide, served as a consultant for multinational companies including Apple, and wrote an Amazon bestseller on design thinking. As the current assistant professor in robotics, UX and design thinking at UAE University, Berengueres is responsible for the robotics and media lab. His team also advises local companies on the application of artificial intelligence (AI).