In August 2024 the AgriFoRwArdS Students and staff travelled to Brunel University in London to attend the Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems Conference (TAROS).
There were five posters presented by AgriFoRwArdS staff and students across the three day conference.
- The benefits of ordinal regression under domain shift – Presented by Cohort 4 Student Andy Perrett, co-authored with his PhD supervisors, Dr James Brown and Dr Petra Bosilj.
- Duckling Platooning – Safety Guarantees through Controlled Information Disclosure – Presented by Cohort 4 Student James Heselden and co-authored with his PhD supervisor Dr Gautham Das.
- Open-source hardware whisker sensor – Presented by Cohort 5 Student Robert Stevenson, and co-authored by fellow Cohort 5 Students Omar Faris, Amanda Xu, Catherine Merchant, Elliot Smith, Benjamin Nicholls, and CDT Academic Dr Charles Fox.
- 3D printer based open-source calibration platform for whisker sensors – Presented by Cohort 5 Student Omar Ali, and co-authored by fellow Cohort 5 Students Liyou Zhou, Emmanuel Arnaud Soumo, Eden Attenborough, Jacob Swindell, George Davies, and CDT Academic Dr Charles Fox.
- Pretrained Visual Representations in Reinforcement Learning – Presented by CDT Academic Dr Athanasios Polydoros and co-authored with Cohort 3 Student Emlyn Williams.
It was great to see such engagement with the AgriFoRwArdS Student’s research, with Cohort 5 Student Omar Faris commenting…
“Our work presented a robotic whisker sensor that is fully open source with clear instructions on how to build and operate it from scratch with low-cost components. Our paper was accepted as a poster with a two-minute lightning presentation. My colleague Robert Stevenson presented the work in the lightning session, and some of the other authors, including me, were present during the poster session. We were pleased by the number of interactions we received from the conference audience who were interested in our work during the poster session. Overall, it felt great to present our work and receive attention and interest for it in this early stage of our AgriFoRwArdS journey.“
Prof Marc Hanheide, Director of the CDT, also attended as a keynote speaker. Providing an interesting perspective on academic careers within robotics, focusing on his key research area of ‘robotics research in the wild’.
In addition to this fantastic show of CDT student work, Robert Stevenson, Dimitris Paparas, Catherine Merchant, Benjamin Nicholls, Omar Ali, Emmanuel Soumo, and James Heselden, were joined by Wageningen University & Research PhD student David Rapado-Rincon for the PGR-ECR day on Friday 23rd August. AgriFoRwArdS, alongside other robotics CDTs from across the UK, came together to share their research with each other. With talks, discussion panels, and videos, the students, along with Prof Marc Hanheide (CDT Director), gave delegates an interesting look into the work which took place as part of the AgriFoRwArdS Summer School this July, which took place in collaboration with Wageningen University & Research.
David Rapado-Rincon, who attended TAROS on behalf of Wageningen University & Research, commented on the conference and the exciting chance for collaboration between AgriFoRwArdS and Wageningen moving forward…
“TAROS was a small conference, but it was filled with high-quality research. Coming from the more applied side of robotics, I found it inspiring to see so much fundamental research, particularly in areas like soft robotics. It was exciting to notice that Wageningen University and AgriFoRwArdS are pursuing similar research paths, as this makes our work highly complementary. I see a lot of potential for future collaborations based on these shared interests.”
Overall it was a successful event for AgriFoRwArdS, with student’s not only having the opportunities to showcase their research, but also find out about the fantastic things going on in the sector. One AgriFoRwArdS Student commented…
“the conference was exciting with rich content and talks. I was pleased by the variety of works and topics presented in the conference. I particularly enjoyed the talks delivered by the keynote speakers as they provided unique and valuable insights and overviews into various robotics topics and fields. Additionally, I had various important and profound interactions with the conference audience and the sponsors during the breaks.“
Thank you to everyone who took part.