Our L-CAS intManLab team, led by Dr Amir Ghalamzan, is co-organising the ICRA workshop on “Task-Informed Grasping IV (TIG-IV): From Farm To Fork” at the ExCel in London on 2nd June 2023.

They have secured a truly inspiring panel of speakers and are also looking for your contributions.

Workshop Objectives and Information

As the world population rapidly grows [from 7.5 billion today] to 9.6 billion in 2050, it is becoming more important to build sustainable supply chains to keep producing high-quality foods. Improved sustainability could be achieved by methods that are highly productive, cost-effective, and environment-friendly whilst foods are processed from acquisition to consumption. Although recent advances in AI and robotics have shown significant potential, many tasks in the current design of food production still rely heavily on human labours and capabilities only. The aim of this workshop is thus to bring together world-leading roboticists and AI practitioners to discuss novel approaches to deploying robotic solutions in the food system throughout the sessions focused on (1) farming, (2) postharvest handling, (3) retail & consumption, and (4) legislation. These will help not only obtain a holistic understanding of the entire supply chain but also find related research questions from different domains (e.g., manipulating soft objects in fruit picking or sandwich making) at one venue. Therefore, TIG-IV will offer a great overview of the state of the art through a series of invited talks and paper/poster presentations. Moreover, active participation will be encouraged to collectively identify useful insights and desired directions for future research in the community. 

Important Dates:

 1 May 2023 (AOE) – Workshop contribution submission deadline

 8 May 2022 – Notifications of acceptance

2 June 2023 – Full-day workshop (in-person @ ExCeL London + hybrid)