Noosphere: Tactile Sensing for General Purpose Robot Learning

Demonstrations with the PR2 Robots, and the low-cost Mobile ALOHA project project, might suggest that technologies for building general-purpose robots are on the verge of readiness, as these can be teleoperated to perform a wide range of daily tasks effectively. However, devoid of tactile sensing feedback, such robots have not yet been shown to possess the dexterous interactive learning capabilities that animals have — even before they develop language. With that, within the tactile sensing community, there is a growing discussion around the idea that touch is a fundamental capability for learning. After all, intelligent animals, including humans, are equipped with tactile sensing from a very early age.

With research on tactile sensing and robotic learning being at a peak point, Noosphere, like its namesake, is a timely and exciting workshop that brings together researchers from tactile sensing and sensors, simulation methods for Sim2Real learning, grasping and manipulation, and interactive perception.

Noosphere (noun): a postulated sphere or stage of evolutionary development dominated by consciousness, the mind, and interpersonal relationships.
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Invited Speakers

Call for papers and posters

We invite you to submit already-accepted work or ongoing research in the format of extended abstracts. The papers are expected to be two-pages long and to follow the conference template. Authors with accepted submissions will be invited to exhibit their poster during the workshop coffee break.

Submissions are now open here: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/Noosphere2024/

Best Submission Award

— sponsored by Ocado Technology

The best submission will be awarded a prize of £300.

Eligibility

  1. The author must be the first author of the submission.
  2. The author must be a student or early-career researcher.
  3. The author must attend the workshop in person (not remotely).
  4. The author agrees to present their work during the workshop 'Award Spotlight' session and to participate in the panel discussion.
Subject Areas

Schedule

Starts at Session Speakers
1:25 PM
(5 mins)		 Opening Welcome message and introduction
1:30 PM
(80 mins)		 Talks I 1:30 PM – Nawid Jamali, Honda Research Institute
1:45 PM – Shan Luo, King’s College London
2:00 PM – Jingxi Xu, Columbia Univ.
2:15 PM – Nathan Lepora, Univ. of Bristol
2:30 PM – Jia Pan, Univ. of Hong Kong
3:15 PM
(15 mins)		 Lightning Round 2 mins presentations by poster authors
(presentations order)
3:30 PM
(30 mins)		 Coffee Break
Poster Session		 Posters displayed and
presenters available for Q&A
4:00 PM
(80 mins)		 Talks II 4:00 PM – Carmelo Sferrazza, UC Berkeley
4:15 PM – Danica Kragic, KTH
4:30 PM – Pulkit Agrawal, MIT
4:45 PM – Wenzhen Yuan, UIUC
5:00 PM – Xiaolong Wang, UC San Diego
5:15 PM
(10 mins)		 Award Spotlight Technical presentation by Zilin Si (best paper submission) — DiffTactile: A Physics-based Differentiable Tactile Simulator for Contact-rich Manipulation
5:30 PM
(30 mins)		 Panel Discussion The speakers and the author of the best
submission engage in a technical discussion
6:00 PM Closing Conclusion and farewell
The time is indicated in the main conference timezone (GMT+2).

Attending

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Organizers

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