The IET Travel Award Report 2016

2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 16-20 May, Stockholm
Liyu Wang, Dr. sc. ETH, MIET, MIEEE
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California at Berkeley

ICRA is the largest and prominent annual robotics conference in the world. It attracts participants from research,
industry and beyond. I have been a regular attendee of the conference since 2012 and my paper entitled
Robotic Folding of 2D and 3D Structures from a Ribbon was accepted to this years conference with other
817 papers (or a 34.7% acceptance rate).

The main part of ICRA 2016 was organized into plenary, keynotes, and technical oral presentations with three
tracks. Technical presentations were organized with a format where three-minute highlights talks in themed
sessions were followed by 45-minute interactive sessions. This was the second time in the 25+ years of ICRA
history. In addition, there were full-day/half-day workshops, tutorials, challenges, exhibition and social events.

Regarding plenary and keynotes presentations, I enjoyed those related to my specific research area, and had
great learning on the landscape of other research topics. For example, Roberto Cingolani from Italian Institute of
Technology surveyed recent experiments combing soft materials and nanotechnology to explore new
architectures for robots. Ken Goldberg and Claire Tomlin from Berkeley delivered the importance of data in
human-robot interaction and flight traffic control. Karl Iagnemma from MIT introduced the landscape of self-
driving technology including its market estimation, industrial players, key problems and his own start-up.

In terms of technical presentations, my talk was arranged in the themed session of Automation and Planning
Systems. I presented my progress towards a new type of fast prototyping method based on automatic folding.
Besides mine, there were nine other presentations on rapid prototyping, automatic knotting, etc. During the
interactive session, I had great interaction with participants who visited my stand. Specifically, I discussed the
technical detail in depth with two researchers who worked in similar projects. In addition, I enjoyed other
sessions such as compliant mechanisms, motion planning, kinematics and dynamics, field robotics,
underactuated robots, flexible and deformable structures, biologically-inspired robots, soft-material robotics, etc.

Exhibition attracted a great amount of attention of mine. There were 42 exhibitors from companies and
academic publishers. The companies included multi-business enterprise Amazon, industry leaders from robotics
such as Kuka iRobot, and DJI, automobiles such as Scania, ergonomics such as Anybody Technology, as well
as start-ups such as Fetch Robotics. I spoke to almost all companies to understand their technology, customers
and revenue model. My key learning was customers are mainly in academia and research.

Besides the main part and exhibition of the conference, I also attended a workshop and all social events. I
rejoined with past and present colleagues from ETH and Berkeley. I also made new connections with
researchers from Delft, Edinburgh, KTH, MIT, Sheffield, Stanford, UC San Diego, York, etc.

I am grateful towards the IET for the Travel Award, which partially enabled me to achieve my goals to attend
ICRA i.e. community awareness, feedback collection, and networking in academia and industry.

Technical session (left) and exhibition (right)