Task-Informed Grasping: Agri-Food manipulation (TIG-III)

A Full-day workshop at International Conference on Robotics and Automation
From 30 May to 5 June 2021
Xi’an – China

Previous workshops from this series:

TIG-II at RSS 2019 ( https://lcas.lincoln.ac.uk/wp/tig-ii/ )

TIG-I at IROS 2018 (https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/iros18)

This workshop is at a proposal stage (more details will be updated soon)

This workshop is supported by IEEE/RAS Technical Committees on: (1) Mobile Manipulation, (2) Agricultural Robotics & Automation, (3) Algorithms for Planning and Control of Robot Motion, (4) Soft Robotics and (5) Robot Learning.

If you require further information on support/endorsement for this workshop, please email: smghames@lincoln.ac.uk

TIG-I and II workshop IROS 2018 and RSS 2019 can be found at

https://lcas.lincoln.ac.uk/wp/tig-ii/ and https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/iros18

Abstract

Agri-food robotics is a key element for precision agriculture (and precision food production) which has been identified as a solution to the increasing demands for agri-food products due to the population growth and raised labour shortage. One of the critical challenges of agri-food robotics is grasping and manipulation of agri-food objects. This workshop aims to bring together world-leading experts in robotic grasping/manipulation applied in the agri-food sector to discuss challenges and possible approaches of agri-food manipulation, ranging from agriculture (e.g. robotic harvesting) to food production (e.g. sandwich making). The challenges involved in the agri-food tasks, such as differentiating between items (e.g. toppings) when making a sandwich or picking ripe fruits from clusters, create many interesting research questions for the robotics community. In TIG-I and TIG-II, we brought together frontiers in control and perception to discuss the general robotic manipulation problem.
This workshop, instead, will mainly focus on the research challenges, e.g. motion planning and control, robot perception, task scheduling, soft robotics and human-robot interaction in the agri-food sector. The workshop will therefore overview the state-of-the-art in agri-food robotics through invited research talks, paper and poster presentations to raise awareness about the scientific and societal challenges in the community.

Topics of interest include (but not limited to):

Agri-food manipulation,
Mobile manipulation,
Data-driven manipulation for agri-food applications,
Grasping and manipulative movements in cluttered environments,
Motion planning/control challenges for agri-food robotics
Tactile sensing and enhanced manipulation
Agri-food sensing technologies
Robotic vision challenges in agri-food applications
Soft-Robotics for agri-food applications
Task-oriented end-effectors: requirements and specifications
Benchmarking and dataset for grasping and manipulation in cluttered environments

Paper submission:

Deadline: 5 May 2021 (no extension)

Notification of acceptance: 16 May 2021

Camera ready: 24 May 2021

All papers must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference. The following paper categories are welcome:

Extended abstract (maximum 2 pages) will be accepted for poster presentation at this workshop.
Full papers Contributed papers (maximum 6 pages) will be accepted based on their quality, originality, and relevance to the workshop. Submitted papers should not be under consideration for publication anywhere else. Submissions should follow the IEEE/RAS format.

Please submit your paper by emailing it to workshop.tig@gmail.com

Programme (tentative)

Sariah Mghames	09:00 — 9:10	Opening
Matthew Howard	09:10 — 9:35	Leveraging on learning techniques for optimal agri-robotic manipulation
Pieter Abbeel	09:40 — 10:05	Recent trends in robot learning
	10:10 — 10:20	Coffee Break
Bruno Siciliano	10:20 — 10:45	Robotics in the service of food making
Robert Katzschmann	10:50 — 11:15	Food manipulation and the challenges of automating food assembly tasks – Soft Robotics
Salah Sukkarieh	11:20 — 11:45	Robotic motion planning in dynamic agriculture environments
Walter Achim	11:50 — 12:15	On the dynamics characterization of plant growth
—	12:20 — 13:20	Lunch
Manoj Karkee	13:20 — 13:45	Vision-based robotic harvesting and pruning
Fei Chen	13:50 — 14:15	Vision on the service of robotic pruning
Zhuoling Huang	14:20 — 14:45	Automated fruit harvesting in complex environment
Lorenzo Jamone	14:50 — 15:15	Tactile sensing: application to fruit quality control
Peter Allen	15:20 — 15:45	Visual-Tactile Geometric Reasoning
Marc Hanheide	15:50 — 16:15	Mobile robotics and HRI in the fruit harvesting chain
	16:20 — 16:30	Lightning talks of posters and papers
	16:30 — 17:00	Poster round and coffee break
Maximo Roa	17:00 — 17:25	End-effectors for soft manipulation: application to agri-food technology
Lewis Anderson	17:30 – 17:55	Advances in machine learning for fruit harvesting
	18:00 – 18:30	Panel discussion — Closing remarks

Accepted papers:

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Organisers

Sariah Mghames, PhD. Postdoc Research Fellow School of Computer Science University of Lincoln, United Kingdom
Tommaso Pardi, PhD Candidate School of Metallurgy and Materials University of Birmingham, United Kingdom
Fumiya Iida, PhD. Reader in Robotics Department of Engineering University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
Mehmet Dogar, PhD. Associate Professor School of Computer Science University of Leeds, United Kingdom
Amir Masoud Ghalamzan Esfahani, PhD. Associate Professor Lincoln Institute for Agri-Food Technology – Lincoln Agri Robotics University of Lincoln, United Kingdom