Mobile Manipulation Hackathon to take place at IROS 2018 in Madrid, Spain

The IEEE-RAS Technical Committee on Mobile Manipulation and PAL Robotics are organizing the first Mobile Manipulation Hackathon, to take place at IROS 2018 in Madrid, Spain.

Mobile manipulation is gaining traction in recent years, with potential applications in diverse areas including manufacturing, logistics, and healthcare. These applications typically require complex manipulation tasks in both structured and unstructured environments, possibly in cooperation or close interaction with humans. Different fields are involved: perception, navigation, task and path planning, control, error recovery, and human-robot interaction. Nowadays, mobile manipulators are commercial products, ready to open new application fields in academia, research and industry. For instance, PAL Robotics offers TIAGo (http://tiago.pal-robotics.com), a mobile robot platform endowed with a 7 DoF arm, a liftable torso and a pan-tilt head. The Mobile Manipulation Hackathon is an opportunity to showcase your abilities in mobile manipulation tasks at IROS 2018 using this highly capable robotic platform!

Scope

The competition is open to contributions from any domain as long as they can be integrated into a mobile manipulation system. Do you have a software component, e.g. a new planner, a new controller, a new object detection system, we are interested! Or do you have a hardware component, e.g. a new tactile sensor, a new camera, a new gripper, we are interested! Our goal is to help you demonstrate your research live! It is difficult to carry your own robot to a conference, and less and less people are impressed by systems "working" in videos. Therefore, we provide you with a robot, an associated complete ROS-based simulation stack to which you can integrate your software, and one week hands-on support at PAL headquarters before IROS to help you polish your integration into a robust demonstration.

Participation

The Hackathon is open to any academic, research or industrial organization interested in mobile manipulation. Teams of max. 5 people can participate either by proposing and implementing a use case for mobile robotics, or by expanding the capabilities of the robotic platform with hardware modifications (e.g. integrating a new camera, tactile sensor or gripper). Selected teams will get the chance to:
-Get free entrance to IROS 2018 for student members of the team
-Receive up to one week of intensive training and integration support for the Hackathon project in Barcelona (travel/accommodation expenses not included)
-Access to the Tiago mobile robot, and presentation of the developments at the Hackathon area in IROS 2018

Timeline for the Hackathon

Expression of interest: until 30 March 2018
Feedback to the teams: 10 April 2018
Entry submission: 15 June 2018
Announcement of six finalist teams: 1 July 2018 
Support in Barcelona: September
IROS competition: 1-4 October 2018

More details can be found on the webpage of the event at http://iros18-mmh.pal-robotics.com

For additional inquiries, please contact the organizers at mobile-manipulation-hackathon-organizers@googlegroups.com

A public forum on the hackathon will be maintained at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mobile-manipulation-hackathon

Here is an opportunity to demonstrate that your research does not only work in video, but in real life as well!

Organizers

IEEE-RAS TC of Mobile Manipulation:
Maximo A. Roa (German Aerospace Center - DLR)
Mehmet Dogar (University of Leeds)
Nikolaus Correll (University of Colorado at Boulder)
PAL Robotics: Francesco Ferro, Carlos Vivas, Jordi Pages
Local Committee: Antonio Morales (Universidad Jaume I)