Program Overview

The following table outlines the final schedule of the RSS 2012 conference. Workshops and tutorials will be woven into the fabric of the conference and will take place in the morning sessions with regular papers, plenaries and poster sessions running in the afternoons.

Mon 9/07/12	Tu 10/07/12	Wed 11/07/12	Th 12/07/12	Fri 13/07/12
8:30-10:00 Workshops
10:00-10:30 Coffee Break
10:30-12:00 Workshops				10:30-12:00 ACFR Lab Tour
12:00-1:15 Lunch			12:00-1:00 Lunch
1:15-2:05 Invited talks	1:15-2:05 Invited talks	1:15-2:05 Invited talks	1:00-1:50 Invited talks	1:00-3:00 Fellowship Winners
2:05-3:20 Oral sessions	2:05-3:20 Oral sessions	2:05-3:20 Oral sessions	1:50-3:05 Oral sessions	1:00-3:00 Fellowship Winners
3:20-3:45 Coffee Break			3:05-3:30 Coffee Break
3:45-5:00 Oral sessions	3:45-5:00 Oral sessions	3:45-5:00 Oral sessions	3:30-5:00 Oral sessions
5:00-6:30 Interactive poster sessions
			6:30-late Banquet

For those who unfortunately can't join us here in Sydney, we will be webcasting all of the workshop and technical talks. The plenary, award presentations and 5 minute teasers will be available here. Workshop webcast urls are listed on the workshop pages. Check the local time in Sydney to make sure you get the timezones correct.

Best Paper Nominations

The following papers have been nominated for best paper awards at RSS 2012.

Affine trajectory deformation for redundant manipulators

Authors:

Quang-Cuong Pham (University of Tokyo)
Yoshihiko Nakamura (University of Tokyo)

Walking and running on yielding and fluidizing ground

Authors:

Feifei Qian (CRAB lab, Georgia Tech)
Tingnan Zhang (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Chen Li (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Aaron Hoover (F. W. Olin College of Engineering)
Pierangelo Masarati (Politecnico di Milano)
Paul Birkmeyer (University of California at Berkeley)
Andrew Pullin (University of California at Berkeley)
Ronald Fearing (University of California at Berkeley)
Dan Goldman (Georgia Tech)

On Stochastic Optimal Control and Reinforcement Learning by Approximate Inference

Authors:

Konrad Rawlik (University of Edinburgh)
Marc Toussaint (FU Berlin)
Sethu Vijayakumar (U. Edinburgh)

Minimal Coordinate Formulation of Contact Dynamics in Operational Space

Authors:

Abhinandan Jain (Jet Propulsion Laboratory)
Cory Crean (Jet Propulsion Laboratory)
Calvin Kuo (Jet Propulsion Laboratory)
Hubertus Von Bremen (Cal Poly Pomona)
Steven Myint (Jet Propulsion Laboratory)

Towards A Swarm of Agile Micro Quadrotors

Authors:

Aleksandr Kushleyev (University of Pennsylvania)
Vijay Kumar (University of Pennsylvania)
Daniel Mellinger (University of Pennsylvania)

Formalizing Assistive Teleoperation

Authors:

Anca Dragan (Carnegie Mellon University)
Siddhartha Srinivasa (CMU)

Visual Route Recognition with a Handful of Bits

Authors:

Michael Milford (QLD University of Technology)

Experiments with Balancing on Irregular Terrains using a Mobile Humanoid Robot

Authors:

Luis Sentis (UT Austin)
Josh Petersen (UT Austin)
Roland Philippsen (Halmstad University)

Preliminary Program

Monday, July 9th, 2012

8:30-10:00	Workshops
W1:	Generating Robot Motion for Contact with the World
W2:	Resource-Efficient Integration of Perception and Control for Highly Dynamic Mobile Systems
W3:	Robots in Clutter: Manipulation, Perception and Navigation in Human Environments
W4:	RGB-D: Advanced Reasoning with Depth Cameras
W5:	Algorithmic Frontiers in Medical Robotics: Coping with Uncertain, Deformable, Heterogenous Environments
10:00-10:30	Coffee Break
10:30-12:00	Workshops Continued
12:00-13:15	Welcome Lunch
13:15-14:05	Invited Talk
	The robot and the philosopher: charting progress at the Turing centenary Anders Sandberg
14:05-14:30	5 Minute Talks
	Persistent Localization and Mapping with a Continuous Appearance-based Topology William Maddern (Queensland University of Technology), Michael Milford (Queensland University of Technology), Gordon Wyeth (Queensland University of Technology)
	Turning-rate Selective Control : A New Method for Independent Control of Stress-engineered MEMS Microrobots Igor Paprotny (UC Berkeley), Christopher Levey (Dartmouth College), Bruce Donald (Duke University)
	Rigidity Maintenance Control for Multi-Robot Systems Daniel Zelazo (University of Stuttgart), Antonio Franchi (Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics), Frank Allgower (Institute for Systems Theory and Automatic Control, Uni. of Stuttgart), Heinrich Bulthoff (Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics), Paolo Robuffo Giordano (Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics)
	State Estimation for Legged Robots - Consistent Fusion of Leg Kinematics and IMU Michael Bloesch (ETH Zurich), Marco Hutter (ETH Zurich), Mark Hoepflinger (ETH Zurich), Stefan Leutenegger (ETH Zurich), Christian Gehring (ETH Zurich), C. David Remy (ETH Zurich), Roland Siegwart (ETH Zurich)
	Toward Information Theoretic Human-Robot Dialog Stefanie Tellex (MIT CSAIL), Pratiksha Thaker (MIT), Robin Deits (Battelle), Thomas Kollar (Carnegie Mellon University), Nicholas Roy (MIT CSAIL)
14:30-14:55	Award Talk
	Towards A Swarm of Agile Micro Quadrotors Aleksandr Kushleyev (University of Pennsylvania), Vijay Kumar (University of Pennsylvania), Daniel Mellinger (University of Pennsylvania)
14:55-15:20	5 Minute Talks
	Exploiting Passive Dynamics with Variable Stiffness Actuation in Robot Brachiation Jun Nakanishi (University of Edinburgh), Sethu Vijayakumar (University Edinburgh)
	Parsing Indoor Scenes Using RGB-D Imagery Camillo Taylor (University of Pennsylvania), Anthony Cowley (University of Pennsylvania)
	Probabilistic Modeling of Human Dynamics for Intention Inference Zhikun Wang (MPI for Intelligent Systems), Marc Deisenroth (U. Washington), Heni Ben Amor (TU Darmstadt), David Vogt (TU Freiberg), Bernhard Scholkopf (MPI for Intelligent Systems), Jan Peters (TU Darmstadt)
	Efficiently finding optimal winding-constrained loops in the plane Paul Vernaza (Carnegie Mellon University), Venkatraman Narayanan (Carnegie Mellon University), Maxim Likhachev (Carnegie Mellon University)
	Time-Optimal Trajectory Generation for Path Following with Bounded Acceleration and Velocity Tobias Kunz (Georgia Tech), Mike Stilman (Georgia Tech, USA)
15:20-15:45	Coffee Break
15:45-16:10	Award Talk
	Affine trajectory deformation for redundant manipulators Quang-Cuong Pham (University of Tokyo), Yoshihiko Nakamura (University of Tokyo)
16:10-16:35	5 Minute Talks
	Robust Object Grasping using Force Compliant Motion Primitives Moslem Kazemi (Carnegie Mellon University), Jean-Sebastien Valois (Carnegie Mellon University), J. Andrew Bagnell (Carnegie Mellon University), Nancy Pollard (Carnegie Mellon University)
	Multi-stage micro rockets for robotic insects Mirko Kovac (Harvard University), Rohit Krishnan (Harvard University), Maria Bendana (Harvard University), Jessica Burton (Harvard University), Michael Smith (Harvard University), Robert Wood (Harvard)
	Extrinsic Calibration from Per-Sensor Egomotion Jonathan Brookshire (MIT), Seth Teller (MIT)
	Probabilistic Temporal Logic for Motion Planning with Resource Threshold Constraints Chanyeol Yoo (ACFR, University of Sydney), Robert Fitch (ACFR, University of Sydney), Salah Sukkarieh (ACFR, University of Sydney)
16:35-17:00	Early Career Spotlight
	Towards Motor Skill Learning for Robotics Jan Peters
17:00-18:30	Interactive Poster Session

Tuesday, July 10th, 2012

8:30-10:00	Workshops
W1:	Generating Robot Motion for Contact with the World
W2:	Resource-Efficient Integration of Perception and Control for Highly Dynamic Mobile Systems
W3:	Robots in Clutter: Manipulation, Perception and Navigation in Human Environments
W4:	RGB-D: Advanced Reasoning with Depth Cameras
W5:	Algorithmic Frontiers in Medical Robotics: Coping with Uncertain, Deformable, Heterogenous Environments
T1:	Machine Learning for Robotics: Old Dreams, New Tools
10:00-10:30	Coffee Break
10:30-12:00	Workshops Continued
12:00-13:15	Lunch
13:15-14:05	Invited Talk
	Small Brains, Small Planes Mandyam Srinivasan
14:05-14:30	5 Minute Talks
	Recognition and Pose Estimation of Rigid Transparent Objects with a Kinect Sensor Ilya Lysenkov (Itseez), Victor Eruhimov (Itseez), Gary Bradski (Willow Garage)
	On the Structure of Nonlinearities in Pose Graph SLAM Heng Wang (Beijing University of Technology), Gibson Hu (University of Technology, Sydney), Shoudong Huang (University of Technology, Sydney), Gamini Dissanayake (University of Technology, Sydney)
	Hybrid Operational Space Control for Compliant Legged Systems Marco Hutter (ETH Zurich), C. David Remy (ETH Zurich), Mark Hoepflinger (ETH Zurich), Christian Gehring (ETH Zurich), Michael Bloesch (ETH Zurich), Roland Siegwart (ETH Zurich)
	Asymptotically-optimal Path Planning on Manifolds Leonard Jaillet (Institut de Robotica), Josep Porta (UPC)
	Physics-Based Grasp Planning Through Clutter Mehmet Dogar (Carnegie Mellon University), Kaijen Hsiao (Willow Garage), Matei Ciocarlie (Willow Garage), Siddhartha Srinivasa (Carnegie Mellon University)
14:30-14:55	Award Talk
	Formalizing Assistive Teleoperation Anca Dragan (Carnegie Mellon University), Siddhartha Srinivasa (Carnegie Mellon University)
14:55-15:20	5 Minute Talks
	The Banana Distribution is Gaussian: A Localization Study with Exponential Coordinates Andrew Long (Northwestern University), Kevin Wolfe (Johns Hopkins University), Michael Mashner (Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory), Gregory Chirikjian (Johns Hopkins University)
	Modeling and Prediction of Pedestrian Behavior based on the Sub-goal Concept Tetsushi Ikeda (ATR), Yoshihiro Chigodo (Osaka university), Daniel Rea (University of Manitoba), Francesco Zanlungo (ATR), Masahiro Shiomi (ATR), Takayuki Kanda (ATR)
	Real-Time Inverse Dynamics Learning for Musculoskeletal Robots based on Echo State Gaussian Process Regression Christoph Hartmann (Osaka University), Joschka Boedecker (Osaka University), Oliver Obst (CSIRO), Shuhei Ikemoto (Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka University), Minoru Asada (JST ERATO Asada Project, Osaka University)
	M-Width: Stability and Accuracy of Haptic Rendering of Virtual Mass Nick Colonnese (Stanford University), Allison Okamura (Stanford University)
15:20-15:45	Coffee Break
15:45-16:10	Award Talk
	Walking and running on yielding and fluidizing ground Feifei Qian (CRAB lab, Georgia Tech), Tingnan Zhang (Georgia Institute of Technology), Chen Li (Georgia Institute of Technology), Aaron Hoover (F. W. Olin College of Engineering), Pierangelo Masarati (Politecnico di Milano), Paul Birkmeyer (University of California at Berkeley), Andrew Pullin (University of California at Berkeley), Ronald Fearing (University of California at Berkeley), Dan Goldman (Georgia Tech)
16:10-16:35	5 Minute Talks
	Semiparametric Bayesian Models for Unsupervised Scene Analysis and Reconstruction Dominik Joho (University of Freiburg), Gian Diego Tipaldi (University of Freiburg), Nikolas Engelhard (University of Freiburg), Cyrill Stachniss (University of Freiburg), Wolfram Burgard (University of Freiburg)
	A Distributable and Computation-flexible Assignment Algorithm: From Local Task Swapping to Global Optimality Lantao Liu (Texas A&M), Dylan Shell (Texas A&M)
	What's in the Bag: A Distributed Approach to 3D Fabrication by Duplication with Modular Robots Kyle Gilpin (MIT), Daniela Rus (MIT)
	What Types of Interactions do Bio-Inspired Robot Swarms and Flocks Afford a Human? Michael Goodrich (Brigham Young University), Sean Kerman (Brigham Young University), Brian Pendleton (Brigham Young University), P.B. Sujit (University of Porto)
16:35-17:00	Early Career Spotlight
	Mobile Manipulation for Healthcare Charlie Kemp
17:00-18:30	Interactive Poster Session

Wednesday, July 11th, 2012

8:30-10:00	Workshops
W6:	Long-term operation of autonomous robotic systems in changing environment
W7:	Stochastic Motion Planning and Information-Based Control
W8:	Beyond laser and vision: alternative sensing techniques for robotic perception
W9:	Biologically Inspired Robotics
W10:	Robotics for Environmental Monitoring
10:00-10:30	Coffee Break
10:30-12:00	Workshops Continued
12:00-13:15	Lunch
13:15-14:05	Invited Talk
	Single Atom Devices for Quantum Computing Michelle Simmons
14:05-14:30	5 Minute Talks
	Robust Navigation Execution by Planning in Belief Space Bhaskara Marthi (Willow Garage)
	Failure anticipation in pursuit-evasion Cyril Robin (LAAS-CNRS), Simon Lacroix (LAAS-CNRS)
	Inference on networks of mixtures for robust robot mapping Edwin Olson (University of Michigan), Pratik Agarwal (University of Michigan)
	Recognition, Prediction, and Planning for Assisted Teleoperation of Freeform Tasks Kris Hauser (Indiana)
	Hierarchical Motion Planning in Topological Representations Dmitry Zarubin (FU Berlin), Vladimir Ivan (University of Edinburgh), Marc Toussaint (FU Berlin), Taku Komura (University of Edinburgh), Sethu Vijayakumar (University of Edinburgh)
14:30-14:55	Award Talk
	Visual Route Recognition with a Handful of Bits Michael Milford (QLD University of Technology)
14:55-15:20	5 Minute Talks
	CompAct Arm: a Compliant Manipulator with Intrinsic Variable Physical Damping Matteo Laffranchi (Italian Institute of Technology), Nikos Tsagarakis (Italian Institute of Technology), Darwin Caldwell (Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT))
	Fast Weighted Exponential Product Rules for Robust Distributed Data Fusion in General Multi-Robot Networks Jonathan Schoenberg (Cornell University), Nisar Ahmed (Cornell University), Mark Campbell (Cornell University)
	Estimating Human Dynamics On-the-fly Using Monocular Video For Pose Estimation Priyanshu Agarwal (State University of New York at Buffalo), Suren Kumar (State University of New York at Buffalo), Julian Ryde (State University of New York at Buffalo), Jason Corso (State University of New York at Buffalo),Venkat Krovi (State University of New York at Buffalo)
	Colour-Consistent Structure-from-Motion Models using Underwater Imagery Mitch Bryson (ACFR, University of Sydney), Matthew Johnson-Roberson (ACFR, University of Sydney), Oscar Pizarro (ACFR, University of Sydney), Stefan Williams (ACFR, University of Sydney)
15:20-15:45	Coffee Break
15:45-16:10	Award Talk
	On Stochastic Optimal Control and Reinforcement Learning by Approximate Inference Konrad Rawlik (University of Edinburgh), Marc Toussaint (FU Berlin), Sethu Vijayakumar (University of Edinburgh)
16:10-16:35	5 Minute Talks
	Optimization-Based Estimator Design for Vision-Aided Inertial Navigation Mingyang Li (UCR), Anastasios Mourikis (UC Riverside, USA)
	Development of a Testbed for Robotic Neuromuscular Controllers Alexander Schepelmann (Carnegie Mellon University), Hartmut Geyer (Carnegie Mellon University), Michael Taylor (Carnegie Mellon University)
	Distributed Approximation of Joint Measurement Distributions Using Mixtures of Gaussians Brian Julian (MIT), Stephen Smith (University of Waterloo), Daniela Rus (MIT)
	Robust Loop Closing Over Time Yasir Latif (Universidad de Zaragoza), Cesar Cadena Lerma (Universidad de Zaragoza), Jose Neira (Universidad de Zaragoza)
16:35-17:00	Early Career Spotlight
	Towards Lifelong Navigation for Mobile Robots Cyrill Stachniss
17:00-18:30	Interactive Poster Session

Thursday, July 12th, 2012

8:30-10:00	Workshops
W6:	Long-term operation of autonomous robotic systems in changing environment
W7:	Stochastic Motion Planning and Information-Based Control
W8:	Beyond laser and vision: alternative sensing techniques for robotic perception
W11:	From theory to practice of performance comparison and result replications in Robotics Research
W12:	Workshop on Aerial Robotics and the Quadrotor Platform
10:00-10:30	Coffee Break
10:30-12:00	Workshops Continued
12:00-13:00	Lunch
13:00-13:50	Invited Talk
	Machine Learning as Probabilistic Modeling Zoubin Ghahramani
13:50-14:15	5 Minute Talks
	Practical Route Planning Under Delay Uncertainty: Stochastic Shortest Path Queries Sejoon Lim (MIT), Christian Sommer (MIT), Evdokia Nikolova (Texas A&M University), Daniela Rus (MIT)
	Optimization of Temporal Dynamics for Adaptive Human-Robot Interaction in Assembly Manufacturing Ronald Wilcox (MIT), Stefanos Nikolaidis (MIT), Julie Shah (MIT)
	Contextual Sequence Prediction with Application to Control Library Optimization Debadeepta Dey (Carnegie Mellon University), Tian Yu Liu (Carnegie Mellon University), Martial Hebert (Carnegie Mellon University), J. Andrew Bagnell (Carnegie Mellon University)
	Variational Bayesian Optimization for Runtime Risk-Sensitive Control Scott Kuindersma (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), Roderic Grupen (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), Andrew Barto (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
14:15-14:40	Award Talk
	Minimal Coordinate Formulation of Contact Dynamics in Operational Space Abhinandan Jain (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), Cory Crean (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), Calvin Kuo (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), Hubertus Von Bremen (Cal Poly Pomona), Steven Myint (Jet Propulsion Laboratory)
14:40-15:05	5 Minute Talks
	Tendon-Driven Variable Impedance Control Using Reinforcement Learning Eric Rombokas (University Of Washington), Mark Malhotra (University of Washington), Evangelos Theodorou (University of Washington), Yoky Matsuoka (University of Washington), Emo Todorov (University of Washington)
	An Object Based Approach to Map Human Hand Synergies onto Robotic Hands with Dissimilar Kinematics Guido Gioioso (Universita di Siena), Gionata Salvietti (Universita di Siena), Monica Malvezzi (Universita di Siena), Domenico Prattichizzo (Universita di Siena)
	Feature-Based Prediction of Trajectories for Socially Compliant Navigation Markus Kuderer (University of Freiburg), Henrik Kretzschmar (University of Freiburg), Christoph Sprunk (University of Freiburg), Wolfram Burgard (University of Freiburg)
	E-Graphs: Bootstrapping Planning with Experience Graphs Michael Phillips (Carnegie Mellon University), Benjamin Cohen (University of Pennsylvania), Sachin Chitta (Willow Garage), Maxim Likhachev (Carnegie Mellon University)
15:05-15:30	Coffee Break
15:30-15:55	Award Talk
	Experiments with Balancing on Irregular Terrains using a Mobile Humanoid Robot Luis Sentis (UT Austin), Josh Petersen (UT Austin), Roland Philippsen (Halmstad University)
15:55-16:20	5 Minute Talks
	FFT-based Terrain Segmentation for Underwater Mapping Bertrand Douillard (ACFR, University of Sydney), Navid Nourani-Vatani (ACFR, University of Sydney), Matthew Johnson-Roberson (ACFR, University of Sydney), Stefan Williams (ACFR, University of Sydney), Chris Roman (University of Rhode Island), Oscar Pizarro (ACFR, University of Sydney), Ian vaughn (University of Rhode Island), Gabrielle inglis (University of Rhode Island)
	Guaranteeing High-Level Behaviors while Exploring Partially Known Maps Shahar Sarid (Cornell University), Bingxin Xu (Cornell University), Hadas Kress-Gazit (Cornell University)
	Optimal Control with Weighted Average Costs and Temporal Logic Specifications Eric Wolff (Caltech), Ufuk Topcu (Caltech), Richard Murray (Caltech)
	Guaranteeing System Safety by Learning Worst-Case Disturbances Online: Iterated Guaranteed Safe Online Learning Jeremy Gillula (Stanford University), Claire Tomlin (UC Berkeley)
16:20-17:00	Invited Talk
	Enter the Dragon: the SpaceX COTS missions Andrew Howard
17:00-18:30	Interactive Poster Session
18:30-22:30	Banquet Dinner

July 9-13, 2012, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia