If you've perused our website over the past several days, then you're doubtless aware that we attended the International Conference on Robotics and Automation last week in Montreal. It was a fantastic event, and we're pleased to now present with you with what we think were the highlights of the show.
According to Prof. Greg Dudek, General Chair of ICRA 2019, approximately 75 people attended the conference when it was first held in 1985. With over 4,000 participants attending this time around, however, he says it was officially the largest robotics show to ever take place.
Among the various things we noticed was the fact that a lot of the robots were designed not so much to go out into the workforce, but instead to be used as platforms by scientists performing robotics research. Dudek additionally had some thoughts of his own on trends at the show.
"The hot thing now is combining machine learning, where you learn straight from data, with classic approaches where you hand-code things," he told us. "Initially, everything was hand-coded physics and engineering, and then we went to pure learning, and now we're seeing learning incorporate the classic methods, so you get guarantees on performance combined with adaptivity."
Dudek also noted that there were a lot of soft robotics on display, along with adaptive robots designed to interact directly with humans.
You can see some of those technologies, along with plenty of other nifty robots and related gadgets, by proceeding on to the photo gallery.
Conference website: ICRA 2019