Technical Program

The Robotics: Science and Systems 2008 will be hosted by ETH Zurich, Switzerland, from June 25 to June 28, 2008.

The main conference will be held on June 25, June 26, and June 27, followed by one day of workshops and tutorials on June 28. All main conference events will take place in the Auditorium of ETH Zurich's Main Building (HG), located on ETH Main Campus in the city center of Zurich.

The conference banquet will take place on Thursday, June 26, 2008. All participants should meet 7:15pm at Zurich Main Station for a special train to the banquet location on top of Uetliberg.

Please see the online proceedings for an overview of papers that will be presented at the conference.


Tuesday June 24, 2008

16:00 Registration Desk Open
18:00 Welcome Drink at Registration Desk

Wednesday June 25, 2008

8:30 Opening Session
9:00 Session W1 Chairperson: Jose Neira
9:00 Invited Talk Armin Gruen, Positioning, Modeling and Navigation with Photogrammetric Techniques
9:55 Oral P1: A. Huang, D. Moore, M. Antone, E. Olson, S. Teller, Multi-Sensor Lane Finding in Urban Road Networks
10:20 break
10:45 Session W2 Chairperson: Hugh Durrant-Whyte
10:45 Oral P2: B. Douillard, D. Fox, F. Ramos, Laser and Vision Based Outdoor Object Mapping
11:10 Oral P3: I. Posner, M. Cummins, P. Newman, Fast Probabilistic Labeling of City Maps
11:35 Oral P4: P. Giguere, G. Dudek, Clustering Sensor Data for Terrain Identification using a Windowless Algorithm
12:00 lunch
12:00 Lab Tours Lab tours at 12:10 and 12:50, starting at Registration Desk
13:30 Session W3 Chairperson: Fabio Ramos
13:30 Invited Talk Miguel Nicolelis, Computing with Neural Ensembles
14:25 Oral P5: S. Funiak, P. Pillai, M. Ashley-Rollman, J. Campbell, S. Goldstein, Distributed Localization of Modular Robot Ensembles
14:50 Poster Spotlights I posters P7-P16
15:15 break
15:40 Session W4 Chairperson: Kevin Lynch
15:40 Oral P6: N. Michael, V. Kumar, Controlling Shapes of Ensembles of Robots of Finite Size with Nonholonomic Constraints
16:05 Poster Spotlights II posters P17-P26
17:00 Poster Session* at the Faculty Club
20:30 Soccer European Soccer Championship at the Faculty Club - Semifinals (Germany vs. Turkey)

(*) Poster session will have Drinks, Finger-Food, Videos (Faculty Club).

P7 L. Odhner, H. Asada, Stochastic Recruitment: A Limited-Feedback Control Policy for Large Ensemble Systems
P8 C. Vallespi-Gonzalez, T. Stentz, Prior Data and Kernel Conditional Random Fields for Obstacle Detection
P9 H. Kurniawati, D. Hsu, W. Lee, SARSOP: Efficient Point-Based POMDP Planning by Approximating Optimally Reachable Belief Spaces
P10 D. Dolgov, S. Thrun, Detection of Principle Directions in Unknown Environments for Autonomous Navigation
P11 S. Bhattacharya, S. Hutchinson, Approximation Schemes for Two-player Pursuit Evasion Games with Visibility Constraints
P12 K. Yamane, Y. Nakamura, A Numerically Robust LCP Solver for Simulating Articulated Rigid Bodies in Contact
P13 J. Lien, Hybrid Motion Planning Using Minkowski Sums
P14 S. Schmidt-Rohr, S. Knoop, M. Lsch, R. Dillmann, Bridging the Gap of Abstraction for Probabilistic Decision Making on a Multi-modal Service Robot
P15 J. Sturm, C. Plagemann, W. Burgard, Adaptive Body Scheme Models for Robust Robotic Manipulation
P16 N. Moshtagh, N. Michael, A. Jadbabaie, K. Daniilidis, Bearing-Only Control Laws For Balanced Circular Formations of Ground Robots
P17 K. Seo, S. Chung, J. Slotine, CPG-based Control of a Turtle-like Underwater Vehicle
P18 B. Lavis, T. Furukawa, HyPE: Hybrid Particle-Element Approach for Recursive Bayesian Searching and Tracking
P19 P. Cheng, J. Fink, V. Kumar, Abstractions and Algorithms for Cooperative Multiple Robot Planar Manipulation
P20 F. Kanehiro, F. Lamiraux, O. Kanoun, E. Yoshida, J. Laumond, A Local Collision Avoidance Method for Non-strictly Convex Objects
P21 R. Diankov, N. Ratliff, D. Ferguson, S. Srinivasa, J. Kuffner, BiSpace Planning: Concurrent Multi-Space Exploration
P22 R. Pearce, M. Morales, N. Amato, Structural Improvement Filtering Strategy for PRM
P23 A. Petrovskaya, S. Thrun, Model Based Vehicle Tracking for Autonomous Driving in Urban Environments
P24 P. Gemeiner, A. Davison, M. Vincze, Improving Localization Robustness in Monocular SLAM Using a High-Speed Camera
P25 L. Han, L. Rudolph, Simplex-Tree Based Kinematics of Multibody Systems Involving Loops: A Case Study of Foldable Objects
P26 N. Yu, C. Hollnagel, A. Blickenstorfer, S. Kollias, R. Riener, fMRI-Compatible Robotic Interfaces with Fluidic Actuation

Thursday June 26, 2008

9:00 Session Th1 Chairperson: Nick Roy
9:00 Invited Talk Jean-Louis Deneubourg, Shared Decision Making in Mixed Societies of Animals and Robots
9:55 Oral P27: G. Hollinger, S. Singh, A. Krause, Proofs and Experiments in Scalable, Near-Optimal Search by Multiple Robots
10:20 Oral P28: M. Likhachev, D. Ferguson, Planning Long Dynamically-Feasible Maneuvers For Autonomous Vehicles
10:45 break
11:00 Session Th2 Chairperson: Jeff Trinkle
11:00 Oral P29: T. Vose, P. Umbanhowar, K. Lynch, Friction-Induced Velocity Fields for Point Parts Sliding on a Rigid Oscillated Plate
11:25 Oral P30: K. Byl, R. Tedrake, Metastable Walking on Stochastically Rough Terrain
11:50 Oral P31: R. Ghrist, Y. Baryshnikov, Target Enumeration via Integration over Planar Sensor Networks
12:15 lunch
12:15 Lab Tours Lab tours at 12:15 and 12:50, starting at Registration Desk
13:45 Session Th3 Chairperson: Atsushi Konno
13:45 Invited Talk Kevin O'Regan, How to Build Consciousness into a Robot: the Sensorimotor Approach
14:40 Oral P32: A. Thomas, V. Ferrari, B. Leibe, T. Tuytelaars, L. van Gool, Using Recognition to Guide a Robot's Attention
15:05 Oral P33: D. Katz, Y. Pyuro, O. Brock, Grounding Relational Reinforcement Learning for Manipulation in Unstructured Environments
15:30 break
15:55 Session Th4 Chairperson: Nicola Simeon
15:55 Oral P34: D. Silver, J. Bagnell, A. Stentz, High Performance Outdoor Navigation from Overhead Data using Imitation Learning
16:20 Oral P35: M. Luber, K. Arras, C. Plagemann, W. Burgard, Tracking and Classification of Dynamic Objects: An Unsupervised Learning Approach
16:45 Oral P36: J. Glover, D. Rus, N. Roy, Manipulation using Inference of Scene Geometry
17:10 End of Sessions
19:00 Conference Banquet Train departing at 19:16 from Zurich main station to "Uetliberg"
20:30 Invited Talk Luis von Ahn, Human Computation
23:30 End of Banquet

Friday June 27, 2008

9:00 Session F1 Chairperson: Brad Nelson
9:00 Invited Talk Howard Berg, Motile Behavior of E. Coli, a Remarkable Robot
9:55 Oral P37: S. Floyd, C. Pawashe, M. Sitti, Dynamic Modeling of an Untethered Magnetic Micro-Robot
10:20 break
10:45 Session F2 Chairperson: Roland Siegwart
10:45 Early Career Spotlight Eric Klavins (University of Washington)
11:25 Early Career Spotlight Rob Wood (Harvard University)
12:05 lunch
12:05 Lab Tours Lab tours at 12:10 and 12:50, starting at Registration Desk
13:35 Session F3 Chairperson: Metin Sitti
13:35 Invited Talk Toshio Yanagida, Mechanism Involved in Utilizing Thermal Fluctuations by Muscle Molecular Motor
14:30 Oral P38: T. Noda, T. Miyashita, H. Ishiguro, N. Hagita, Self-organizing Super-Flexible Skin Sensors Embedded on the Whole
14:55 break
15:20 Session F4 Chairperson: Vijay Kumar
15:20 Oral P39: X. Liu, K. Kim, Y. Zhang, Y. Sun, NanoNewton Force Sensing and Control in Microrobotic Cell Manipulation
15:45 Oral P40: C. Stachniss, C. Plagemann, A. Lilienthal, W. Burgard, Gas Distribution Modeling using Sparse Gaussian Process Mixture Models
16:10 break
16:25 Best Student Paper Award
16:30 Participant Feedback and Closing
17:00 Goodbye Drinks at the Faculty Club

Workshops and Tutorials: Saturday June 28, 2008

The main conference will be followed by one day of workshop events and tutorials.