MOTIVATION & GOAL

Generalization Challenges for Real-World Deployment

As consumer needs and industry demands evolve, there is an increasing call for robust and adaptable mobile manipulation solutions for efficient and reliable robot deployment across varied environments, from factories to homes. Building general-purpose mobile manipulation systems that scale beyond specific scenarios and adapt to novel conditions remains a great challenge in robotics. Although considerable progress has been made in advancing mobile manipulation capabilities and skills, a notable gap persists in addressing the generalization necessary for confident deployment in real-world environments. 

Robot learning facilitates autonomous skill acquisition, adaptation to unseen and dynamic environments, and execution of complex tasks. While learning-based approaches show success in controlled settings and specific tasks, achieving generalization in real-world deployment remains an open challenge.

This workshop explores existing and envisioned mobile manipulation systems, technologies, and learning methods with a focus on adaptability, robustness, and generalization in diverse real-world settings. Key questions include building an ideal mobile manipulation system, effective generalization under domain and deployment gaps, coordination of generalizable skills for long-horizon tasks, leveraging multi-modal sensory information, control architectures and end-to-end learning (vision-language-action models), addressing linguistic and interactive features for human-centric environments, utilizing simulated environments for real-world applications, managing uncertainties in sensing/actuation during deployment, strategies for continuous skill adaptation, and  measuring generalization.

The workshop encourages poster submissions on innovative mobile manipulation generalization solutions capable of handling diverse real-world complexities and tasks. The workshop seeks to foster a research community, facilitating collaboration among researchers, industries, and entrepreneurs to advance mobile manipulation robots and learning solutions for practical deployment.

SCOPE

• Ideal Mobile Manipulation System: Designing mobile manipulators with optimal embodiments, on-board sensing, and end tools to support generalization in diverse scenarios.
• Skill Generalization and Safety: Developing methods for mobile manipulators to generalize learned skills, ensuring safety, adaptability, and human interaction in dynamic real-world environments.
• Simulation to Reality (Sim2Real): Utilizing simulated environments for effective robot training, focusing on skill transfer and generalization from simulation to real-world applications.
• Human-Centric Features: Identifying crucial linguistic, interactive, and safety features for mobile manipulators to perform complex tasks in human-centric environments.
• Control Architectures: Exploring how various control architectures impact the speed, reliability, generalization, and robustness of mobile manipulation.
• Managing Uncertainties and Continuous Adaptation: Addressing uncertainties in sensing and actuation, and developing strategies for continuous skill adaptation, ensuring robust and reliable performance in diverse real-world settings.

Important Dates 

• Submission Deadline Extented to : September 10, 2024
• Notification of Publication Decision: September 12, 2024
• Workshop Date: October 15, 2024 (Half Day Workshop)
• Paper Format: IROS conference standard pdf format and be a maximum of 4 pages excluding references

Submission Guidelines

We welcome authors to submit extended abstracts (2-4 pages excluding references) showcasing relevant work on workshop topics, including field-collected dataset analysis, robot technologies and platforms, interactive demonstrations, and innovative, creative, and futuristic solutions for Mobile Manipulation Generalization for Real-World Deployment

• Format: Submissions should be in IROS conference standard PDF format.
• Page Limit: Maximum of 4 pages (excluding references).
• Review Process: All submissions will undergo peer review based on relevance, technical quality, and ethics.
• Presentation Opportunities: Accepted papers will be presented as posters, with some selected for spotlight talks during the workshop.
• Publication: Accepted papers will be available on the workshop website.

Awards

• Best Poster Award: 500$ USD

Committees

Organizing committee

• Rajkumar Muthusamy ( Dubai Future Foundation)

• Paolo Dario ( Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa)

• Tarek Taha ( Dubai Future Foundation)

• Georgia Chalvatzaki (TU Darmstadt)

• Kensuke Harada (Osaka University)

• Yuqian Jiang (UT Austin)

• Roberto Martin-Martin (UT Austin)

• Weiwei Wan (Osaka University)

Invited Speakers

• Prof. Tamim Asfour (Karlsruhe Institute ofTechnology (KIT))

• Prof. Kris Hauser (University of IllinoisUrbana-Champaign)

• Prof. Deepak Pathak (Carnegie MellonUniversity)

• Prof.Guyue Zhou (Tsinghua University)

• Ted Xiao (Google DeepMind)

Venue

The 2024 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2024) will be held October 14 – 18, 2024 at ADNEC in Abu Dhabi ,UAE.

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to rajkumar.muthusamy@dubaifuture.gov.ae

Sponsors

• Dubai Future Labs