Course Overview

Real-world deployability has always been a foundational focus of robotics research. However, over the past 15 years, these ideas have been tested at an unprecedented scale as start-ups and new efforts in established companies have productionized robotics to offer new consumer products, expand business services, and fulfill government contracts. This workshop aims to “back-propagate” the learnings from these efforts to academic researchers across applications, algorithms, hardware, and systems who want to contextualize their work in industry trends.

We will feature talks by industry veterans across a variety of robotics subfields. Based on their experiences “in the trenches” of productionizing robotics research, workshop speakers will concretize, refine, and even refute the notion that industry is meaningfully different from academia through studies, retrospectives, and anecdotes.

In addition, we are soliciting posters targeting work involving robot hardware, especially encouraging presentation of ‘‘positive’’ and ‘’negative’’ results (opportunities and challenges) that otherwise might have trouble finding a suitable venue. We hope this will be an opportunity to not just connect researchers working on hardware with each other, but also give them access to feedback from industry professionals. To view our call for posters or submit a poster abstract, click here!

For researchers, this workshop will help lift the curtain on the realities of academic to industry tech transfer. For industry experts, this workshop provides an opportunity to influence the direction of academic research. For both, we hope to provide an venue for integrated dialogue and identification of new potential collaborations